Cognitive activity in limited time conditions: individual and typological features

Abstract

Rapid socio-economic and technological innovations, quick pace of life, colossal information loads and limited time are highly common for the society of the XXI century. Reducing performance time is one of the powerful stress factors that affect the adaptation processes and the psychophysiological state of the body. The result of a temporary limitation in task implementation may result in the optimization of all processes in the body and maximized work efficiency or have an opposite effect. There are many physiological markers of stress response development in the human body, one of which is the parameters of eye movement. Evidence exists that representatives with different types of autonomic regulation of functions have specific manifestations of stress reactions that are traced in the oculomotor activity. In this research, seventy students of the Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov, Russia, were examined for the study of their oculomotor reactions. Students with different autonomic status solved cognitive tasks either in a limited or unlimited time. The most sensitive parameters of oculomotor reactions were revealed when participants were reading under a time limit. It has been discovered that representatives with different vegetative status have specific manifestations of cognitive activity under the conditions of restricted time. The study shows that the efficiency of processing visual information in a limited time is accompanied by an increase in frequency parameters and a decrease in the duration of fixations identified in representatives with normotonic vegetative status.