In aviation, knowing the internal state of pilots is desirable to prevent and detect abnormal situations
such as an excessive cognitive workload (CW) or acute stress, both known to impact human
performance 1. Detecting these states becomes crucial with the possible emergence of Single Pilot
Operations (SPO), during which tasks will be largely supported by a single pilot and the aircraft
systems. The mental constructs of CW and acute stress have been extensively studied in the human
factor literature, but the analysis of their respective impact in the same ecological situations
remains poorly studied. In the current study, twenty-one private pilots from the French Civil Aviation
University were recruited. They all performed two realistic flight simulator scenarios with
the same difficult level and duration (around 35 minutes each). The CW was manipulated with
the difficulty of a secondary task (low CW vs high CW; for details, see [2]) and the level of stress
was manipulated by means of a social stressor (low arousal vs high arousal). We examined brain
hemodynamic activity via functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) with a portable NIRS system
(NIRSport, NIRx Medical Technologies, NY, USA)
