Assessing The Directional Agreement Between Cognitive And Physical Performance In Response To Fatigue

Cognitive impairment contributes to occupational accidents, with both physical and cognitive fatigue affecting performance. While cognitive fatigue impacts postural stability, increasing fall risk, its effect on physical performance following bouts of exercise in young adults remains less clear. PURPOSE: To determine the directional agreement between cognitive and physical performance changes in young adults following physically induced fatigue. METHODS: 10 participants (6 M/4F, 32.4 ± 9.5 yrs) completed physical performance tests (countermovement jump (CMJ), isometric midthigh pull (IMTP), plyometric pushups (PPU), and max hand release pushups (HRPU)) and 4 cognitive tests: go-no-go(GNG), Stroop color (STRP), Nback-2 (NBK2), and visual search (VS) whose accuracy and reaction time (RT) were recorded. Following hour-long military-simulated fatiguing protocol, the participants repeated the physical and cognitive tests. Directionality agreements between pre/post changes in physical and cognitive measures were assessed using Cohen’s kappa agreement levels (k) as slight: 0-.2; fair: .2-.4; moderate: .4-.6; substantial: .6-.8; near perfect: .8-1. RESULTS: Participants showed varied directional agreement between physical measures and cognitive task RTs (Fig. 1), with greater variability for NbK2. Substantial to near-perfect agreement was found between CMJ peak power and GNG RT (k = 1), CMJ height and GNG RT (k = 0.75), and CMJ reactive strength index and GNG RT (k = 0.7).Moderate agreement was observed between IMTP Impulse 150, 200, Force 100, PPU, and NBK2 RT (k = 0.5), as well as PPU time to peak force and STRP RT (k = 0.53). CONCLUSIONS: High agreement was observed between physical measures and simple reaction time tasks (e.g., GNG RT), whereas weaker agreement with complex cognitive tasks, such as working memory (e.g., NBK2 RT). Future studies should explore the differential impacts of cognitive task complexity on physical performance due to fatigue. Supported by: ChatGPT used for text refinement (less than 10%). It was not use in the analysis