Assessing Recovery from Cognitive Load through Pen Input

Abstract

This paper explores the impact of rest duration on recovery from cognitively demanding tasks, focusing on pen input features as an indicator of load and recovery. We designed a user experiment involving a cognitively loading task with three levels of difficulty, followed by a controlled rest period, and then a fixed difficulty task. The participants answered the tasks by writing alphabet letters on a tablet monitor. Subjective ratings validated the increasing difficulty of the first task (Friedman ANOVA p<<0.05), and also indicated that the rest duration had a significant impact on the perceived difficulty of the subsequent task (p=0.048). In terms of pen features, the height of the written ..