Occipital Multiscale Entropy as a Generalized Marker of Differential Task Performance

Abstract

The identification of a single neuroelectrophysiological measure of differential performance across time in a fatigued state remains elusive, especially where a single marker would need to be reliable and generalizable across a variety of tasks with varying demands (e.g., perceptual, cognitive). Here, we propose assays of occipital multiscale entropy (MSE) as one such putative marker. Toward this end, we aimed to determine if differential patterns of occipital MSE between good and poor performers generalized across fatiguing perceptual (a 10-minute psychomotor vigilance test) and cognitive (“Greebles” task, involving classification and decision-making) tasks, finding significant MSE differences across good and poor performers in these disparate tasks at multiple MSE timescales. Based on this converging evidence, we frame occipital MSE as a potential fatigue marker that is generalizable across task type.