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Mental fatigue can be induced by long time mental work, mental fatigue caused worse performance and accidents. As a non-invasive technique, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) can measure blood oxygen activity in the cerebral cortex which reflect the cognitive function of brain indirectly. Aiming at investigating whether fNIRS can measure the mental fatigue and study the spatial pattern of hemodynamic response for mental fatigue, we used three sessions of verbal 2-back working memory task for a total of 120 minutes to induce mental fatigue, 15 healthy subjects were recruited and 30 channels including prefrontal cortex (PFC) and motor cortex (MC) were measured by fNIRS. The mean oxyhemoglobin feature for 20s was extracted as well as subjective fatigue level and performance. The results showed significant increase of subjected fatigue level as well as significant decrease performance from session one to three task. With the increased level of fatigue, oxyhemoglobin in PFC increase significantly and the spatial pattern of hemodynamic response in the all 30 channels varied with task duration as well. These findings indicated the potential of fNIRS measured hemodynamic as a mental fatigue indicator.
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