How Stress Affects Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) Measurements of Mental Workload
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent work has demonstrated that functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy has the potential to measure changes in Mental Workload with increasing ecological validity. It is not clear, however, whether these measurements are affected by anxiety and stress of the workload, where our informal observations see some participants enjoying the workload and succeeding in tasks, while others worry and struggle with the tasks. This research evaluated the effects of stress on fNIRS measurements and performance, using the Montreal Imaging Stress Task to manipulate the experience of stress. While our results largely support this hypothesis, our conclusions were undermined by data from the Rest condition, which indicated that Mental Workload and Stress were often higher than during tasks. We hypothesize that participants were experiencing anxiety in anticipation of subsequent stress tasks. We discuss this hypothesis and present a revised study designed to better control for this result.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".