Recent functional connectivity studies seem to suggest that this salience network is crucial for balancing the engagement of task-related, rest-related activity and ongoing activity in the human brain.
For instance, altered brain activation during attention allocation and motor response inhibition tasks has been observed in VPT adolescents (Nosarti et al., 2006) and adults (Lawrence et al., 2009), which may reflect a differential engagement of task-specific brain areas, as well as the use of alternative neuroanatomical substrates for task completion.
In order to localize brain networks involved during the engagement of cognitive tasks, both temporal and spatial resolution are critical.
Therefore, as far as the differences in patterns of engagement across different task types is concerned, all four task types in this study engaged learners with the task to the same extent.
The term "task engagement" highlights the importance of task characteristics in engaging learners in a task because it entails task characteristics such as task difficulty and task stimuli.
The latter observation suggests that apathy or lack of engagement with the task is unlikely to explain the observed group differences in decision making.
Fig. 1 Mean comparison of task engagement across the task types.
Passive fatigue is produced by underload and monotony, and is associated with loss of task engagement and alertness.
(1) Lack of task engagement could be observed at the beginning of task as there were long pauses and hesitations and laughs.
Despite the importance of task engagement, few studies have studied it in language learning context (Dembovskaya, 2009; Ma, 2009; Maad, 2012).
Prior controlling for individual differences is absent from this research which might affect the learner performance and in turn patterns and amount of task engagement.
