Mental Fatigue of Long-Term Office Tasks in Virtual Environment

Mental fatigue can affect people's performance, which is an important human factor in various application fields. In the past, the research on mental fatigue caused by long-term tasks was based on real environments. This study assessed the mental fatigue of performing long-term tasks in a virtual environment (VE) and compared it with the mental fatigue in the real environment (RE). We designed a comparative 8-hour experiment, allowing the participants to perform four simple office tasks in the VE and the RE. Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) was carried out at the six stages of the experiment. The changes in mental fatigue of the subjects were evaluated by lapses and mean reaction times. According to the results, it can be concluded that the mental fatigue caused by long-term office work in VE was higher. Short breaks can suppress the growth of lapses, but its effect on the mean reaction times was not obvious.