Frontal theta EEG dynamics in a real-world air traffic control task

Mental workload and time-on-task effect are two major factors expediting fatigue progress, which leads to performance decline and/or failure in real-world tasks. In the present study, electroencephalography (EEG) is applied to study mental fatigue development during an air traffic control (ATC) task...

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Published in2013 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) Vol. 2013; pp. 5594 - 5597
Main Authors Shou, Guofa, Ding, Lei
Format Conference Proceeding Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States IEEE 01.01.2013
Subjects
Aviation
Brain modeling
Electroencephalography
Fatigue
Frontal Lobe - physiology
Frontal Lobe - physiopathology
Humans
Independent component analysis
Integrated circuits
Linear Models
Linear regression
Male
Mental Fatigue - physiopathology
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
Theta Rhythm
Time Factors
Time-frequency analysis
Workload
Young Adult
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN1094-687X
1557-170X
DOI10.1109/EMBC.2013.6610818

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Summary:Mental workload and time-on-task effect are two major factors expediting fatigue progress, which leads to performance decline and/or failure in real-world tasks. In the present study, electroencephalography (EEG) is applied to study mental fatigue development during an air traffic control (ATC) task. Specifically, the frontal theta EEG dynamics are firstly dissolved into a unique frontal independent component (IC) through a novel time-frequency independent component analysis (tfICA) method. Then the temporal fluctuations of the identified frontal ICs every minute are compared to workload (reflected by number of clicks per minute) and time-on-task effect by correlational analysis and linear regression analysis. It is observed that the frontal theta activity significantly increase with workload augment and time-on-task. The present study demonstrates that the frontal theta EEG activity identified by tfICA method is a sensitive and reliable metric to assess mental workload and time-on-task effect in a real-world task, i.e., ATC task, at the resolution of minute(s).
ISSN:1094-687X
1557-170X
DOI:10.1109/EMBC.2013.6610818