Abstract
Compared to cardiac parameters and skin conductivities, the photoplethysmogram (PPG) recorded at fingertips and other parts near to peripheral nerve ends have been recently revealed to be yet another sensitive measure for cognitive load assessment. However, there is so far no research on measuring adolescents’ cognitive load using physiological signals. A comprehensive study on the effects of PPG morphometrics over a cohort covering both adolescent and adult students is also absent. In this study, we analyze the morphological features of PPG on cognitive load assessment and compare them between adolescent and adult students. Experiments on two-level arithmetic tasks show that the PPG morphometrics reached the same level of significance on the effect of task difficulty/period as heart rate, and different morphological behaviors were also shown between adolescent and adult students during the cognitive task effects, which may imply their physiological differences across age. Physiological signals recorded by wearable devices are also found to be effective in measuring cognitive load.
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Notes
The arithmetic calculation is used in a large literature in physiology and biophysiology as a task to study stress via mental effort (Ritter et al. 2007).
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Institute for Future Education and Evaluation Tsinghua University (2019IFEE003). We thank all the volunteers for their participation in our experiment. We thank all the reviewers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions for improving the initial draft of this manuscript.
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XQ, JW contributed equally as first coauthors. YL, YZ contributed conception and design of the study; XQ and JS conducted experiments and organized the database; JW performed the statistical analysis; JW and QX wrote the first draft of the manuscript; JW and QX wrote sections of the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read and approved the submitted version.
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Xuan, Q., Wu, J., Shen, J. et al. Assessing cognitive load in adolescent and adult students using photoplethysmogram morphometrics. Cogn Neurodyn 14, 709–721 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-020-09617-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-020-09617-2