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

• Published in: 2013 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
• Language: English
• 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
• ISSN: 1094-687X; 1557-170X
• DOI: 10.1109/EMBC.2013.6610818

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).