Assessing recovery from cognitive load through pen input

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 pp<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 characters decreased significantly when the rest duration was reduced (ANOVA p<p<0.05), and the pen pressure decreased significantly as the task difficult increased (p=0.009). These encouraging results suggest the addition of a crucial time factor in the cognitive load theory, and benefits to HCI practitioners through better control of content and information pace.