Towards a Unified Modality-Agnostic Multimodal Framework for Cognitive Workload Assessment

Cognitive workload reflects the mental effort required during task performance and is central to the design of adaptive human-machine systems. The use of biosignals to measure cognitive workload has been extensively researched and documented; however, studies examining the effects of combining heterogeneous biosignal modalities for this purpose remain limited. To provide insight into this area, we developed a unified, modality-agnostic, hierarchical Transformer-based architecture to process heterogeneous biosignal modalities within a single model. We use this framework in a pilot study evaluating all 31 possible combinations of five modalities: Electrocardiogram (ECG), Electrodermal Activity (EDA), Respiration (RESP), Peripheral Oxygen Saturation (SpO2), and Electroencephalogram (EEG), under leave-one-subject-out validation across three cognitively distinct tasks: abstract reasoning (IQ), arithmetic problem solving (MATH), and a game task (GAME). In this pilot setting, the results suggest that: (i) EEG is the strongest single modality, ranking highest in IQ, GAME, and the pooled ALL setting, where samples from all three tasks are combined; (ii) adding more modalities does not consistently improve performance; (iii) the full five-modality combination achieves the highest textitAverage score of 73.02% on IQ and 68.08% when the textitAverage scores are averaged over the four evaluation settings: IQ, MATH, GAME, and ALL; and (iv) the proposed method reduces model size by approximately 50% compared with late-fusion alternatives while maintaining a lower inference time.