Abstract

The ability to learn is fundamentally important to the survival of all animals. To better adapt to the changing environment and daily challenges, people need to learn new skills and knowledge by practicing repetitively. The learning effect mainly depends on brain plasticity during training, and decreases over time due to becoming tired, losing energy, and failing to sustain attention. Cognitive fatigue (CF) is about the decrement in mental effort or self-motivation when engaging in cognitively demanding tasks. Due to inevitable CF during repetitive training, the task performance cannot be improved or maintained permanently. In addition, CF has been found to be a considerable symptom in many psychiatric disorders, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson disease. Comparing with numerous studies on the mechanism of learning progress, we know much less about fatigue, especially the relationship between learning and CF.