The confinement imposed by covid turned video conferencing into a daily staple for most 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 to “zoom”. Schools, companies and public institutions around the world were holding meetings on Zoom that they used to do in person, and within a few weeks of this global behavior being introduced, people were already talking about Zoom fatigue to describe the ‘exhaustion that many people felt after a day full of meetings through the screen.
Theories quickly emerged as to why virtual interaction was more exhausting than face-to-face (more intense eye contact, the pressure to see the same image, the effort to communicate without the non-verbal component…), but the existence of the phenomenon had only been investigated through surveys and self-assessments by users. Now, an interdisciplinary research team led by René Riedl of the Upper Austrian University of Applied Sciences and Gernot Müller-Putz of the Graz University of Technology has managed to provide neurophysiological evidence that Zoom fatigue is real .
According to the study they have published in Scientific Reports, they measured through electroencephalograms and electrocardiograms, as well as through questionnaires, the fatigue parameters of people who had participated in a 50-minute university conference face-to-face, in a room traditional events, and also online through videoconferencing. This allowed them to record and compare objective physiological parameters and subjective perceptions having received exactly the same content.
In all analyses, the researchers found higher rates of fatigue in the videoconferencing test. The questionnaire revealed that participants felt significantly more tired, drowsy and fed up compared to participating in the face-to-face session; they also felt less animated, 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 Alpha waves in the parietal and occipital channels, depending on whether the conference was followed online or not. They also detected a gradual decrease and more heart rate variability during the video conference.
“Our results suggest that the use of videoconferencing may incur cognitive costs that individuals and organizations should not ignore,” say the authors.
Perhaps this has to do with the different neural activity there is when talking face-to-face or via video call. A group of Yale neuroscientists used sophisticated imaging techniques to track in real time the brain activity of two people when they were conversing face-to-face and also when they were doing it via Zoom. They measured eye movements, pupil size, brain electrical activity and cerebral blood flow. And they detected that, initially, people spent more time looking at each other in face-to-face meetings than online. In addition, 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 brain areas responsible for of 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 capacity for facial processing. On the other hand, they saw more coordinated neural activity between the brains of people talking face-to-face, suggesting an increase in reciprocal exchanges of social signals.
The authors of the study, published in Imaging Neuroscience last month, suggest that perhaps the brain processes live and virtual interactions through different neural circuits, and so the ability to detect facial micromovements is lower if the meeting is in line
“In our study we found that the social systems of the human brain are more active during real meetings than in Zoom; the virtual appears to be an impoverished communication system compared to face-to-face communication,” summarized neuroscientist and lead author of the paper, Joy Hirsch, when she presented the results.
The findings of these two investigations make it clear that live and direct interactions are more dynamic, spontaneous and complete than virtual ones, even though the latter “exhaust” more. Despite this, its authors do not advocate giving up the use of such useful tools as video conferences. 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 not essential can significantly reduce fatigue levels. Another research 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 Laboratory of Human Interaction 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 separate keyboard to expand the space between the viewer and the screen; disable the camera so you don’t see the same image on the screen or take some breaks by occasionally turning off the camera and using only the audio to avoid the pressure of being watched and to allow the body to relax for a while.
