The confinement forced by covid turned videoconferencing into a basic element of daily life for the majority of people, forced to work, communicate and meet from home. The video calling and virtual meeting software Zoom became popular so quickly that people were not meeting for an online meeting, but rather to “do a zoom.” Schools, companies and public institutions around the world held meetings on Zoom that they previously held in person and, a few weeks after this global behavior was established, people began to talk about “Zoom fatigue” to describe the exhaustion that many people felt. after a day full of meetings through the screen.
Theories quickly emerged about why virtual interaction was more exhausting than face-to-face interaction (more intense eye contact, the pressure of seeing one's own image, the effort to communicate without the non-verbal component...), but the existence of the phenomenon was only had investigated through surveys and self-assessments by users.
Now, an interdisciplinary research team led by René Riedl from the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences and Gernot Müller-Putz from the Graz University of Technology has managed to provide neurophysiological evidence that Zoom fatigue is real.
According to the study they published in Scientific Reports, they measured through electroencephalograms and electrocardiograms, as well as through questionnaires, the fatigue parameters of people who participated in a 50-minute university conference in person, in a traditional lecture hall, and also online through videoconference. This allowed them to record and compare objective physiological parameters and subjective perceptions having received exactly the same content.
Across all measures, the researchers found higher rates of fatigue in the videoconferencing test. The questionnaire revealed that participants felt significantly more tired, sleepy and fed up compared to participating in the face-to-face session; They also felt less encouraged, happy and active.
And these conditions were associated in the electroencephalogram with significant differences in the Theta wave band in the frontal and occipital channels, and the Alpha waves in the parietal and occipital channels depending on whether or not the conference was followed online. They also detected a gradual decrease in heart rate and greater heart rate variability during the videoconference.
“Our results suggest that the use of video conferencing may incur cognitive costs that individuals and organizations should not ignore,” the authors say.
Perhaps this has to do with the different neural activity that takes place if they talk face to face or by video call. A group of Yale neuroscientists has used sophisticated imaging techniques to track in real time the brain activity of two people talking face to face and also doing so via Zoom.
They measured eye movements, pupil size, brain electrical activity and cerebral blood flow. And they detected that, to begin with, people spent more time looking at each other in face-to-face meetings than in online ones. Additionally, pupil diameter (which is associated with emotional arousal) was larger when participants were face-to-face, a situation in which they also observed higher levels of activity in the areas of the brain responsible for visual perception.
In this sense, the researchers point out that the increase in activity detected in the electroencephalogram during face-to-face interactions is characteristic of a greater facial processing capacity. On the other hand, they saw more coordinated neural activity between the brains of people who spoke face to face, suggesting an increase in reciprocal exchanges of social signals.
The authors of the study, published in Imaging Neuroscience a few weeks ago, suggest that perhaps the brain processes live and virtual interactions through different neural circuits and therefore the ability to detect facial micromovements is lower if the meeting is online.
“In our study we found that the social systems of the human brain are more active during real meetings than on Zoom; “virtual communication seems to be an impoverished communication system compared to face-to-face communication,” summarized the neuroscientist and main author of the work, Joy Hirsch, when presenting the results.
The findings of these two investigations make it clear that live interactions are more dynamic, spontaneous and complete than virtual ones, despite the fact that the latter “exhaust” more. Despite this, its authors do not advocate giving up the use of tools as useful as videoconferencing.
What the Austrian researchers do raise is the need to study what “effective countermeasures” can be applied to reduce the fatigue and stress caused by Zoom meetings “to maintain health in an increasingly digital world.”
Along these lines, some experiments carried out in recent years suggest that turning off the camera while its use is not essential can significantly reduce fatigue levels. Other work on this topic concluded that standing and walking during virtual meetings promotes creative thinking.
At the beginning of 2021, Jeremy Bailenson, founder of the Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory at Stanford University and one of the first to analyze the phenomenon of Zoom fatigue, already proposed some “palliative” solutions: reduce the size of the screen and use a independent keyboard to expand the space between the viewer and the screen; disable the camera so as not to see your own image on the screen or take breaks by turning off the camera from time to time and using only the audio to avoid the pressure of being watched and for the body to relax for a while.
