Directed Attention Fatigue - Symptoms

Symptoms

Extreme levels of mental fatigue lead to incompetence and irritability. Studies that require participants to carry out attention-demanding tasks under conditions of high distraction reveal how unpleasant a mentally fatigued person can be. After exposure to such an experience, individuals are less likely to help someone in need. They are also more aggressive, less tolerant, and less sensitive to socially important cues. Fatigue that is experienced by participants of these kinds of studies is induced by attention-intensive tasks, and the observed effects of such fatigue are correlated with decline in inhibitory control. Signs of Directed Attention Fatigue include temporarily feeling unusually distractible, impatient, forgetful, or cranky when there is no associated illness. In more severe forms, it can lead to bad judgment, apathy, or accidents, and can contribute to increased stress levels.

There are 6 major areas of mental processing that are affected during onset of DAF, which are as follows:

  1. Input- One may experience misperception and miss social cues.
  2. Thinking- One may experience feelings of restlessness, confusion, forgetfulness and/or decreased metacognition.
  3. Behavior- One may experience feelings of impulsiveness and recklessness, and may find that they have a diminished level of threshold between thoughts and actions. One may also act out-of-character.
  4. Executive Functioning- One may experience an inability to plan and make appropriate decisions, and may experience impaired judgment ability.
  5. Emotions- One may experience short-temperedness and feelings of unpleasantness.
  6. Social Interactions- One may experience heightened irritability and increased frequency of antisocial feelings.

Overlap of symptoms from the six above categories is highly indicative of Directed Attention Fatigue.

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