Mental and auditory load increase safety risks in the cockpit

A new study carried out in collaboration with by scientists at France’s Institute of Aeronautics and Space (ISAE-SUPAERO) and the University of Toulouse, shows that pilots are at significant risk of missing system alerts when undergoing high mental load and high auditory load. The study used a simulated cockpit task and registered behavioral and electrophysiological responses to variations in mental and perceptual loads. The combined effects of these two factors increased the proportion of missed alerts to an alarming 68%.

Reference: Causse, M., Parmentier, F. B. R., Mouratile, D., Thibaut, D., Kisselenko, M., & Fabre, E. (in press). Busy and confused? High risk of missed alerts in the cockpit: an electrophysiological study. Brain Research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2022.148035

Highlights:

  • Efficient perception of auditory alarms is essential in safety-critical contexts.

  • Miss rate drastically increased with high mental and auditory loads.

  • P3b amplitude indexed mental and auditory loads variations.

  • P3b amplitude was anti-correlated with individual alarm miss rate.

  • Auditory alarm efficiency could be assessed with P3b measures.

Abstract: 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). Evidence shows 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 a 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.

New study on Parkinson's disease accepted for publication in Neuropsychology

Congratulations to Antonia and Pilar for their latest publication on facial emotional recognition in patients with Parkinson’s disease. the study will be published in Neuropsychology.

The study compared patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and control participants in a task measuring the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions. The results suggests that patients with PD present with a relative deficit in the recognition of emotions from facial expressions and that this deficit is related to an alteration of inhibitory functions.

Reference: Siquier, A., & Andrés, P. (2022).  Facial emotion recognition in Parkinson’s disease: the role of executive and affective domains. Neuropsychology, in press.

Abstract: Objective. The ability to recognize emotions from facial expression (FER) may be impaired in Parkinson’s disease (PD). We aimed to explore FER in PD patients by using a dynamic presentation of emotions across different intensities and to examine the extent to which executive and affective alterations contributed to FER deficits. Methods. Fifteen PD patients and 15 healthy controls were assessed on the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT). FER performance was tested for correlations and regression analyses with affective and neuropsychological tests to identify and quantify which factors best predicted ERT accuracy. Results . PD patients showed poorer performance on the ERT, specifically on angry expressions, but they benefited from increased intensity as much as controls did. Differences were also found for apathy, depression and executive tests, especially in the inhibition domain. Importantly, differences between groups on the ERT disappeared when controlling for inhibition and the affective symptoms. A significant effect of inhibition dysfunction was also observed on the ERT performance. Conclusions . Our findings demonstrate the presence of emotion recognition deficits of morphed facial expressions in patients with PD. Moreover, they suggest that inhibition dysfunctions may act as an important factor negatively influencing FER. The present study highlights the complex nature of emotion processing and its relation with emotional-affective  

Watch Fabrice's talk at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society

The talk presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (November, 2021) is noW available to watch on YouTube.

Reference:
Parmentier, F. B. R., & Gallego, L. (2021). Is Deviance Distraction Immune to the Prior Sequential Learning of Stimuli and Responses? Talk presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, 4-7 November.

Abstract:
Unexpected auditory stimuli presented in the context of an otherwise repeated standard sound capture participants’ attention away from a focal task and yield distraction. While making such sounds predictable reduces distraction, the effect of making target stimuli and responses predictable is unknown. Using a modified serial reaction time task, we installed the learning of a sequence of target stimuli before testing the impact of unexpected sounds on performance. In the learning phase, participants pressed response buttons corresponding to visual cues appearing in one of four spatial locations arranged horizontally. Unbeknownst to participants, the sequence of locations followed a pattern during several blocks before being replaced by a new pattern. The data provided solid evidence of sequence learning for the repeated sequence. In the auditory distraction phase, auditory distractors were presented immediately before each visual target. Unexpected sounds lengthened response times compared to the standard sound (novelty distraction), equally for learned and new sequences. We conclude that the anticipation of target stimuli and responses does not shield participants from deviance distraction.

Fabrice Parmentier becomes moderator of the Open Sesame Forum

After many years programming experiments in E-Prime, we are starting to develop tasks using Open Sesame and its browser-oriented version OSWeb.

E-Prime is a great tool and has been Fabrice Parmentier’s go-to experiment programming software for several years. It will most likely remain a feature of the Cognitive Psychology Lab, but it is expected that Open Sesame, a free and open program, will progressively become our main software for experimental studies (online and lab-based) in the future.

Fabrice began exploring Open Sesame and its suitability for online experiments back in March 2021, leading him to become increasingly active in Open Sesame’s official forum site, helping other users to solve their task programming problems. This was noticed by Open Sesame’s creator and administrator of the forum, Prof. Sebastiaan Mathôt (University of Groningen, Netherlands), who has just invited Fabrice to join the team of moderators.

Open Sesame-s reference:
Mathôt, S., Schreij, D., & Theeuwes, J. (2012). OpenSesame: An open-source, graphical experiment builder for the social sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 44(2), 314-324. doi:10.3758/s13428-011-0168-7