A Neuroergonomics Approach to Measure Pilot’s Cognitive Incapacitation in the Real World with EEG

Mental overload and mental fatigue are two degraded cognitive states that are known to promote cognitive incapacitation. We adopted a neuroergonomics approach to investigate these states that remain difficult to induce under laboratory settings thus impeding their measurement. Two experiments were conducted under real flight conditions to respectively measure the electrophysiological correlates of mental fatigue and mental overload with a 32 channel-dry EEG system. Our findings revealed that the occurrence of mental fatigue was related to higher theta and alpha band power. Mental overload was associated with higher beta band power over frontal sites. We performed single trial classification to detect mental fatigue and over-load states. Classification accuracy reached 76.9% and 89.1%, respectively, in discriminating mental fatigue vs. no fatigue and mental overload vs. low-high load. These preliminary results provide evidence for the feasibility of detecting neural correlates of cognitive fatigue and load during real flight conditions and provide promising perspectives on the implementation of neuroadaptive technology especially in the context of single pilot-operation.