Abstract
With so much of the body and brain’s physiology and chemistry changing in a rhythmic circadian manner, it is hardly surprising to note that there are equivalent changes in a person’s mood, subjective activation and performance efficiency. Thus, an individual’s mental performance abilities are very different from one time of the day to another, and these changes over time can be categorized and studied using similar circadian techniques to those developed for the physiological measures (e.g., body temperature, blood pressure) more often studied by the chronobiologist. There are, however, several major differences that must be recognized if mental performance rhythms are to be studied properly. This chapter will start with a dicussion of these differences, then move on to discuss intertask differences in circadian mental performance rhythms, and the oscillatory changes underlying them.
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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Monk, T.H. (1992). Chronobiology of Mental Performance. In: Touitou, Y., Haus, E. (eds) Biologic Rhythms in Clinical and Laboratory Medicine. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-78734-8_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-78734-8_15
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