Measuring the Amplitude of the N100 Component to Predict the Occurrence of the Inattentional Deafness Phenomenon

In the field of aviation, a significant amount of accidents are attributable to a phenomenon called inattentional deafness, defined as “the propensity to remain unaware of unexpected, though fully perceptible auditory stimuli such as alarms”. The present study aimed at testing the impact of cognitive load on the perception of auditory information unrelated to the piloting task at stake in an ecological flight context. Pilots had to perform simultaneously a piloting task (i.e., approach and landing) in a A320 flight simulator and a passive auditory oddball task, with standard (80%) and deviant (20%) tones played. Lower N100 amplitudes were found in response to deviant tones when the piloting task was associated with a high cognitive load than a low cognitive load, demonstrating that cognitive load disrupts the perceptual processing of auditory stimuli, which is likely to trigger inattentional deafness in pilots

High Working Memory Load Impairs Language Processing during a Simulated Piloting Task: An ERP and Pupillometry Study

Given the important amount of visual and auditory linguistic information that pilots have to process, operating an aircraft generates a high working-memory load (WML). In this context, the ability to focus attention on relevant information and to remain responsive to concurrent stimuli might be altered. Consequently, understanding the effects of WML on the processing of both linguistic targets and distractors is of particular interest in the study of pilot performance. In the present work, participants performed a simplified piloting task in which they had to follow one of three colored aircraft, according to specific written instructions (i.e., the written word for the color corresponding to the color of one of the aircraft) and to ignore either congruent or incongruent concurrent auditory distractors (i.e., a spoken name of color). The WML was manipulated with an n-back sub-task. Participants were instructed to apply the current written instruction in the low WML condition, and the 2-back written instruction in the high WML condition. Results revealed a major effect of WML at behavioral (i.e., decline of piloting performance), electrophysiological, and autonomic levels (i.e., greater pupil diameter). Increased WML consumed resources that could not be allocated to the processing of the linguistic stimuli, as indexed by lower P300/P600 amplitudes. Also, significantly, lower P600 responses were measured in incongruent vs. congruent trials in the low WML condition, showing a higher difficulty reorienting attention toward the written instruction, but this effect was canceled in the high WML condition. This suppression of interference in the high load condition is in line with the engagement/distraction trade-off model. We propose that P300/P600 components could be reliable indicators of WML and that they allow an estimation of its impact on the processing of linguistic stimuli

Cockpit intelligent et interfaces cerveau-machine passives

La complexité croissante des cockpits et la pression opérationnelle peuvent amener les pilotes à être dépassés en situation critique. Dès lors, un enjeu est de développer des outils pour estimer l’état de l’équipage et adapter dynamiquement l’interaction avec le cockpit. Dans cette perspective, de nombreux travaux se focalisent sur la mesure en temps réel de la charge de travail comme indicateur de la performance d’un opérateur humain. Nous postulons que cette approche présente de nombreuses limites et avançons que la mesure de l’état d’engagement d’un opérateur est d’avantage représentative de sa performance. Nous concluons cet article par une présentation des principales techniques et de leurs enjeux pour mettre en œuvre des interfaces cerveau-machines dites « passives » destinées à évaluer le niveau d’engagement d’un pilote pour permettre le développement d’un cockpit intelligent

Human Mirror Neuron System Based Alarms in the Cockpit: A Neuroergonomic Evaluation

Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) events still remain among the deadliest accidents in aviation. When facing the possible occurrence of such an event, pilots have to immediately react to the ground proximity alarm (“Pull Up” alarm) in order to avoid the impending collision. However, the pilots’ reaction to this alarm is not always optimal. This may be at least partly due to the low visual saliency of the current alarm and the deleterious effects of stress that alleviate the pilot’s reactions. In the present study, two experiments (in a laboratory and in a flight simulator) were conducted to (1) investigate whether hand gesture videos (a hand pulling back the sidestick) can trigger brainwave frequencies related to the mirror neuron system; (2) determine whether enhancing the visual characteristics of the “Pull Up” alarm could improve pilots’ response times. Electrophysiological results suggest that hand gesture videos attracted more participants’ attention (greater alpha desynchronization in the parieto-occipital area) and possibly triggered greater activity of the mirror neuron system (greater mu and beta desynchronizations at central electrodes). Results obtained in the flight simulator revealed that enhancing the visual characteristics of the original “Pull Up” alarm improved the pilots’ reaction times. However, no significant difference in reaction times between an enlarged “Pull Up” inscription and the hand gesture video was found. Further work is needed to determine whether mirror neuron system based alarms could bring benefits for flight safety, in particular, these alarms should be assessed during a high stress context

Sex and the money – How gender stereotypes modulate economic decision-making: An ERP study

In the present event-related potential study, we investigated whether and how participants playing the ultimatum game as responders modulate their decisions according to the proposers’ stereotypical identity. The proposers’ identity was manipulated using occupational role nouns stereotypically marked with gender (e.g., Teacher; Engineer), paired with either feminine or masculine proper names (e.g., Anna; David). Greater FRN amplitudes reflected the early processing of the conflict between the strategic rule (i.e., earning as much money as possible) and ready-to-go responses (i.e., refusing unequal offers and discriminating proposers according to their stereotype). Responders were found to rely on a dual-process system (i.e., automatic and heuristic-based system 1 vs. cognitively costly and deliberative system 2), the P300 amplitude reflecting the switch from a decision making system to another. Greater P300 amplitudes were found in response to both fair and unfair offers and male-stereotyped proposers’ offers reflecting an automatic decision making based on heuristics, while lower P300 amplitudes were found in response to 3€ offers and the female-stereotyped proposers’ offers reflecting a more deliberative reasoning. Overall, the results indicate that participants were more motivated to engage in a costly deliberative reasoning associated with an increase in acceptation rate when playing with female-stereotyped proposers, who may have induced more positive and emphatic feelings in the participants than did male stereotyped proposers. Then, we assume that people with an occupation stereotypically marked with female gender and engaged in an economic negotiation may benefit from their occupation at least in the case their counterparts lose their money if the negotiation fails

EEG/ERP as a Measure of Mental Workload in a Simple Piloting Task

Operating an aircraft is cognitively challenging: pilots have to control the plane and must remain responsive to potential verbalauditory stimuli (e.g. Air Traffic Control Communication) and auditory alerts (e.g. Terrain Awareness and Warning System). Fifteen participants had to control an aircraft in order to target one of three differently-colored aircrafts displayed on a computer screen. The name of the color (written in black ink) corresponding to the aircraft to target was displayed in the center of the screen. Simultaneously with the onset of the written name of the color, a spoken color name distractor that participants had to ignore was played. This auditory distractor was either congruent (10%, spoken color name matched the written color) or incongruent (10%, spoken color name did not match the written color). The task difficulty varied in terms of working memory load with an n-back-like sub-task. In the low load condition, participants had to target the aircraft corresponding to the currently presented written instruction (n = 0). In the high load condition, participants had to target the aircraft corresponding to the instruction presented two trials before (n = 2). Behavioral analysis showed that increased mental workload provoked a decrease in piloting performance, i.e. participants tended to forgetthe correct instruction. On the physiological level, EEG/ERP measurements related to instructions showed that increased mental workload was accompanied by lower P3b amplitude. We assume that the lower P3b amplitude reflects the depletion of the cognitive resources allocated to the processing of the instructions. These results suggest that P3b can be a relevant indicator of the openness of the system to sudden and unexpected critical stimuli such as auditory alert

Busy and confused? High risk of missed alerts in the cockpit: An electrophysiological study

The ability to react to unexpected auditory stimuli is critical in complex settings such as aircraft cockpits or air traffic control towers, characterized by high mental load and highly complex auditory environments (i.e., many different auditory alerts). Evidences show that both factors can negatively impact auditory attention and prevent appropriate reactions. In the present study, 60 participants performed a simulated aviation task varying in terms of mental load (no, low, high) concurrently to a tone detection paradigm in which the complexity of the auditory environment (i.e., auditory load) was manipulated (1, 2 or 3 different tones). We measured both detection performance (miss, false alarm, d’) and brain activity (event-related potentials) associated with the target tone. Our results showed that both mental and auditory loads affected target tone detection performance. Importantly, their combined effects had a large impact on the percentage of missed target tones. While, in the no mental load condition, miss rate was very low with 1 (0.53%) and 2 tones (1.11%), it increased drastically with 3 tones (24.44%), and this effect was accentuated as mental load increased, yielding to the higher miss rate in the 3-tone paradigm under high mental load conditions (68.64%). Increased mental and auditory loads and miss rates were associated with disrupted brain responses to the target tone, as shown by reduced P3b amplitude. In sum, our results highlight the importance of balancing mental and auditory loads to maintain efficient reactions to alarms in complex working environment

Hierarchical Pressure In The Cockpit: An ERP Study

Many accident reports have stressed the fact that first officers sometimes follow risky choices made by captains, resulting in the mitigation of flight safety. While this tendency is well known in the field of aviation, few studies have examined the impact of captains’ influence on first officers’ decision-making and the associated neural correlates. The present study aimed to investigate the extent to which first officers are influenced by captains when the latter adopt a risky behavior. Student pilots who were about to complete their training participated in this study. In the first part of the experiment, they were presented with 50 different landing situations (i.e., pictures of Primary Flight Display, PFD)

A New Interface to Cope With Unreliable Airspeed Indications

When unreliable airspeed events occur, the pilot flying (PF) is required to fly the aircraft using the thrust and the pitch parameters that are displayed in two distanced locations of the flight deck. The Sycopaero interface was designed to limit the PF’s workload by automatically displaying thrust and pitch values specific to aircraft configuration on the primary flight display. Participants performed a simulated flight scenario in which they lost airspeed information during take-off with and without the Sycopaero interface. Both behavioral and ocular results demonstrate that the Sycopaero interface significantly lowers the mental workload of PFs and improves their monitoring performance. Taken together, these results suggest that the Sycopaero interface may be a suitable solution to safely handle airspeed failures

Giving A Hand To Pilots With Animated Alarms Based On Mirror System Functioning

Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) accidents are among the most frequent and deadly accidents in aviation (IATA, 2016). Pilots have sometimes only a few seconds to react to the ‘Pull-Up’ alarm that indicates an imminent collision with the ground. The auditory modality of the alarm can generate stress, which can disrupt cognitive processes (Porcelli et al., 2008) and negatively impact the ability to take timely and appropriate actions (Scholz et al., 2009). While in general humans are less sensitive to auditory stimuli than to visual stimuli (Mrugalska et al. 2016), the auditory component of the ‘Pull-Up’ alarm is loud and prominent whereas its visual component is more discreet (i.e., small text). Consequently, a first step to enhance the efficiency of this alarm would be to increase the conspicuity of its visual component by enlarging the ‘Pull-Up’ text size and to increase its salience by displacing it from the artificial horizon to the bottom of the Primary Flight Display (PFD). However, enlarging the inscription may not be sufficient to cope with the loss of cognitive performance due to stress (BEA, 2009). Previous researched found that watching an action activates premotor cortex and pre-initiates the gesture imitation through the mirror neuron system (Ocampo & Kritikos, 2011). Therefore, presenting a video of the gesture to perform (i.e., a hand pulling the sidestick), in case of imminent impact with the ground, should pre-activate the motor reaction to the alarm and then improve the pilots’ performance in terms of reaction time. The present experiment aimed at assessing whether these ‘Pull-Up’ video better performance than more conventional ‘Pull-Up’ alarms. Both behavioral and electroencephalographic (EEG) results were used to assess the best alarm design