Mental fatigue: costs and benefits.

By Maarten A. S. Boksem, M. Tops. Brain Research Reviews, 2008

742 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance (2013, positive): “…growing literature echoes this focus on the adaptive nature of mental effort, whereby the expected costs and benefits motivate behavior toward more rewarding activities and away from less rewarding ones (e.g., Boksem et al. 2005; 2006; Boksem & Tops 2008; Kool et al. 2010; Kurniawan et al. 2011).”
A Glimpse Far into the Future: Understanding Long-term Crowd Worker Accuracy (2016, background): “Fatigue, a temporary decline in cognitive or physical condition, can gradually result in performance drops over long periods of time [4, 28, 44].”
Evidence of Online Performance Deterioration in User Sessions on Reddit (2016, background): “Although the mechanisms for deteriorating performance are still debated [5, 6, 7], deterioration has been shown to be accompanied by physiological brain changes [8, 9, 10], suggesting a cognitive origin, whether due to mental fatigue, boredom, or strategic choices to limit attention.”
Sustaining attention to simple tasks: a meta-analytic review of the neural mechanisms of vigilant attention. (2013, background): “Other work, however, emphasized the relevance of motivational changes with time on task, which may lead to strategic shifts in effort investment during sustained cognitive performance (Boksem & Tops, 2008; Hockey, 1986, 1997).”