Schedule of Events | Symposia

Enhancement of gripping force by a simultaneous cognitive task via increase in the overall arousal level

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Sofia Nagisa¹, Ethan Oblak¹, Shinsuke Shimojo², Kazuhisa Shibata¹; ¹RIKEN Center for Brain Science, ²California Institute of Technology

When two tasks are performed simultaneously, interference often degrades the performance of each task. This interference is typically explained by the interaction or competition between different brain systems. This study aimed to test whether simultaneously performing tasks can benefit, rather than degrade, the performance of the tasks. Participants performed a muscular endurance task in which they gripped a force sensor for 12 seconds with their maximum sustainable force. They simultaneously performed one of three cognitive tasks with increasing difficulty: 1) merely watching a sequence of images, 2) performing a 1-back task, or 3) performing a 2-back task on the images. Average gripping force increased with cognitive task difficulty, indicating that engagement in the demanding cognitive task improved performance of the unrelated muscular endurance task. Pupil diameter, a physiological measure of arousal, also increased with cognitive task difficulty and strongly correlated with gripping force during each trial. We found similar increases in gripping force and correlations of force and pupil diameter when arousal was manipulated by the amount of monetary reward given for the 2-back task. We also observed increased force production in a separate double task experiment with a tactile discrimination task instead of a visual one. Increased gripping strength was found irrespective of whether participants attended to tactile stimulations on the gripping or non-gripping hand. These results suggest that the double task benefit likely occurred due to an overall increase in arousal level by the cognitive effort, which in turn enhanced the exerted force in the endurance task.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Other