Some researchers have suggested that impairments of individuals with aphasia on cognitive-linguistic tasks reflect an impaired ability to match effort with task demands (e.g. Murray et al., 1997, Clark & Robin, 1991). However, a direct physiological measure of effort IWA invest during such tasks is lacking. Heart rate variability is a well-studied measure of the stress response and is an indicator of the effort allocated to cognitively demanding tasks (Hansen et al., 2003). This research will utilize HRV to understand the relationship among perceptions of task difficulty, behavioral performance, and effort allocated to a verbal working memory task
