Cognitive Performance Index
Discover how much of your brain’s capacity is actually available for productive work — and where the rest is being spent.
The Cognitive Performance Index: a science-based measure of the gap between your current cognitive performance and your theoretical optimum.
The Cognitive Performance Index (CPI) measures the gap between your current cognitive performance and your theoretical optimum, expressed as a percentage out of 100%.
Your brain manages a finite energy pool, and every physiological process draws from it: immune function, stress regulation, emotional processing, and the complex thinking your organisation pays you to do. The CPI tells you how much of that capacity is actually reaching your work — and how much is being consumed by everything else.
What to expect from your assessment
A short, evidence-based diagnostic with a personalised report at the end.
Leaders and knowledge workers
The CPI is designed for leaders and knowledge workers who want an evidence-based picture of their cognitive performance.
Whether you lead a team of 5 or 500, the report is grounded in peer-reviewed neuroscience and workplace research.
10 minutes
Four sections, each using simple sliders. There are no right or wrong answers — the tool is calibrated to your honest self-assessment.
Your responses are private. We use them to generate your report and, in aggregate, to improve AWA’s research.
A personalised performance report
- Your overall CPI score (0–100%) with a performance zone
- A body budget analysis showing where capacity is being lost
- A factor-by-factor priority table across the four layers
- Your top five evidence-based recommendations
- A Productivity Loss Calculator for organisational impact
- A downloadable PDF copy
Most knowledge workers arrive at work with 30–40% of their cognitive capacity already depleted. Organisational and environmental factors then drain another 20–30%. The thinking work you’re paid for is running on whatever remains. The Cognitive Performance Index makes that visible.
The four layers that compound
The CPI assesses four layers of factors that interact rather than simply add up. Poor sleep amplifies your susceptibility to noise. Stress worsens the cost of interruptions. The model captures how these effects cascade.
Foundations
Your personal baseline: sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress, and health. The opening balance of the day’s body budget.
Environment
The background tax from your physical workspace: noise, temperature, air quality, light, technology friction.
Culture
The human factors: psychological safety, trust, autonomy, purpose, social connection, supervisory support.
Workload
How work is structured: interruption frequency, information volume, time pressure, emotional demands, always-on culture.
Your CPI score is what remains after each layer takes its toll. Because the layers multiply rather than simply add up, a weakness in any single area reduces the benefit of all the others.
Where does cognitive capacity actually go?
A typical knowledge-worker day, modelled on AWA’s research. Each segment is a withdrawal from the body’s energy budget before the work itself begins.
The CPI assessment locates your withdrawals and tells you which lever moves the largest amount of capacity back into your work.
Illustrative averages drawn from AWA’s research programmes — the Cognitive Fitness Guide (2015/2020), the 6 Factors research (2014), and Managing Mental Workload (2021). Individual results vary widely; that is precisely why the CPI exists.
Start your assessment
Tell us where to send your report. The assessment takes around 10 minutes and your results are generated automatically when you finish.
Built on three decades of workplace research.
The Cognitive Performance Index integrates three peer-reviewed AWA research programmes produced in partnership with the Centre for Evidence Based Management (CEBMa), using Rapid Evidence Assessment methodology. The unifying scientific framework is Lisa Feldman Barrett’s body budget concept — the principle that cognitive performance is whatever remains in the body’s energy budget after every other physiological process is paid for.
