For example, counting dots would progressively slow down with each new additionnal dot or neuron firing rate would progressively decrease with time.
Hi Catherine, I'm not sure about fatigability, but what you're describing (progressive reduction of response rate to highly repetitive stimuli) could be both a product of proactive interference (previous items are interfering with your ability to generate a novel response), or more likely, repetition attenuation, a phenomenon where with repetitions, less information is "novel" and on fMRI scans for instance, you see a smaller % change from baseline for subsequent presentations of the same stimulus.
Very often the repetition attenuation paradigm is used to see whether participants detect minute changes to the stimulus, or how quickly they encode it & subsequently "recognize" that it's old (I use quotation marks since this is an implicit process).
A quick search for "repetition attenuation" should turn up what you need.
Thank you John but this is not exactly what I need. What you describe is more "habituation" for me.
What I mean by "fatigability" is more like when you climb a mountain the last 10 meters take longer than the 10 first. I would like to know if the same phenomenon has been described for simple cognitive processes.
Sorry for the misunderstanding: yes there is a literature,
I did a search on Google Scholar for "increasing fatigue" cognitive, and (among others) this paper on mental fatigue, motivation & action monitoring turned up
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301051105001481
There's also a robust literature on caffeine ameliorating the effects you're talking about.
Thank you again John. This time, it is is almost what I need but I would like to know if these fatigue phenomenon can be also observed on very simple mental processes such as counting one by one or decodingshort versus long non-words. Subtle slow down of the system might be observed.
I'm not sure how much fMRI type work has been done, but the idea of fatigue is pretty popular in consumer behavior/psychology. Try looking for: "ego depletion" and "cognitive depletion."
Baumeister does lots of work related to this topic:
Baumeister, R.F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D.M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1252-1265.
Thank you Sarah, I'll try "cognitive depletion" and tells you if it worked for me.
This idea of cognitive slowing due to stimuli processing reminds me of classic work from attention. Perhaps some of the work on attention (e.g. early versus late selection; successive versus simultaneous processing of multiple signals) could be helpful?
Pashler's (1999) book, "The Psychology of Attention" could be a great resource. It's older but does a great job summarizing the classic research. Plus, it's really inexpensive these days.
Sarah's ideas about ego/cognitive depletion are good, too.
From my brief consideration, whether the depletion ideas/models or attention ideas/models are most pertinent depends on your main focus. If you're thinking that the cognitive slowing arises because a person's cognitive processing becomes worn down, then the depletion ideas make sense. However, if you're thinking that the slowing results from stimuli overload causing processing delays, then the attention ideas may prove helpful.
As one final thought - you might find more fMRI and brain-imaging work with the attention research. Hope these ideas help!
Carol Dweck's lab and others are doing really interesting work on ego depletion - it seems to only hold in those who believe willpower is a limited resource, or, in the terms of the OP's question, if people believe cognition can be fatigued: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/16/1313475110.abstract
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