Stress Measurement in Multi-Tasking Decision Processes Using Executive Functions Analysis

The presented work aimed to investigate how the impact of cognitive stress would affect the attentional processes, in particular, the performance of the executive functions that are involved in the coordination of multi-tasking processes. The study setup for the proof-of-concept involved a cognitive task as well as a visuomotor task, concretely, an eye-hand coordination task, in combi-nation with an obstacle avoidance task that is characteristic in human-robot col-laboration. The results provide the proof that increased stress conditions can ac-tually be measured in a significantly correlated increase of an error distribution as consequence of the precision of the eye-hand coordination. The decrease of performance is a proof that the attentional processes are a product of executive function processes. The results confirm the dependency of executive functions and decision processes on stress conditions and will enable quantitative meas-urements of attention effects in multi-tasking configurations.