The Effects of Load Carriage and Physical Fatigue on Cognitive Performance

In the current study, ten participants walked for two hours while carrying no load or a 40 kg load. During the second hour, treadmill grade was manipulated between a constant downhill or changing between flat, uphill, and downhill grades. Throughout the prolonged walk, participants performed two cog...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	PloS one 2015-07, Vol.10 (7), p.e0130817-e0130817
Main Authors:	Eddy, Marianna D, Hasselquist, Leif, Giles, Grace, Hayes, Jacqueline F, Howe, Jessica, Rourke, Jennifer, Coyne, Megan, O'Donovan, Meghan, Batty, Jessica, Brunyé, Tad T, Mahoney, Caroline R
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Accuracy Adolescent Adult Aerobics Armed forces Auditory tasks Brain research Cognition Cognition & reasoning Cognitive ability Cognitive tasks Engineering Exercise Exercise Test False alarms Fatigue Fatigue - physiopathology Humans Male Memory Meta-analysis Military Personnel Muscle Fatigue - physiology Oxygen Consumption Physical fitness Reproducibility of Results Studies Target detection Visual tasks Walking - physiology Weight-Bearing - physiology Young Adult
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Summary:	In the current study, ten participants walked for two hours while carrying no load or a 40 kg load. During the second hour, treadmill grade was manipulated between a constant downhill or changing between flat, uphill, and downhill grades. Throughout the prolonged walk, participants performed two cognitive tasks, an auditory go no/go task and a visual target detection task. The main findings were that the number of false alarms increased over time in the loaded condition relative to the unloaded condition on the go no/go auditory task. There were also shifts in response criterion towards responding yes and decreased sensitivity in responding in the loaded condition compared to the unloaded condition. In the visual target detection there were no reliable effects of load carriage in the overall analysis however, there were slower reaction times in the loaded compared to unloaded condition during the second hour.
ISSN:	1932-6203 1932-6203