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Talk on 16 October 2025

We’re excited to welcome back to the Goallab for an upcoming talk on one of the most universal human experiences, mental fatigue.

In his presentation, Erik will discuss how and why mental fatigue arises and how it shapes our decision-making. He will also share his plans for an upcoming research project, which challenges the idea of fatigue as a static state and instead explores it as a dynamic process that fluctuates throughout the day.

Erik, who is a former member of our lab, traces his interest in this topic dates back to work he conducted when he was a member of the Goallab, when he began looking into what mental effort feels like - why demanding tasks sometimes feel enjoyable and at other times exhausting. His research combines physiological measures (like pupil dilation) with subjective experiences of effort and enjoyment. Today, his work continues to contribute to understanding fatigue, a phenomenon that affects everyone, from students to professionals, and plays a key role in conditions such as burnout and depression.

As Erik notes, “Fatigue is an experience almost everyone knows. Healthy people feel it after a few hours of mental work, but for some, it becomes chronic or debilitating. What we need is an interdisciplinary approach to studying fatigue, and that’s what I aim to contribute to.”

Erik also highlights the teamwork behind this research, crediting the work by former and current PhD candidates Dorottya Rusz, Jonas Dora, Pam ten Broeke, and Mara Bialas for their invaluable contributions.

Here is the full abstract for his talk:

"Modern society often requires people to perform mental work for extended periods of time (e.g., at work, at school). Such episodes of mental work lead to the experience of fatigue, a negative affective state that is associated with an unwillingness to invest further effort. In this talk, I will examine when and why people get fatigued, and how fatigue affects decision-making. I will first discuss a set of experimental studies in which we induced fatigue in the laboratory (general conclusions: fatigue affects decisions to switch activities; fatigue impacts decision-making processes in risky choice). Then I will present my plans for a project that will start in 2026. The premise of this project is that, in my view, fatigue science has treated fatigue too much as a static phenomenon (e.g., by assuming fatigue is more or less stable over a week or a month). I will argue that this is not the best way forward, and I will provide an alternative, which involves modelling variations in fatigue with a higher temporal resolution. It would be great to hear what you think."