Influence of mental workload on detecting information varieties revealed by mismatch negativity during flight simulation

Behavioral and physiological measures indexed by frontal mismatch negativity (MMN), temporal MMN and eye blink rate derived from electrooculogram (EOG) were used to assess the mental workload related to flight simulation tasks. A total of 14 healthy flying cadets carried out flight simulation tasks under high and low mental workload conditions respectively. The mental workload conditions were manipulated by the complexity of abnormal attitude identification task presented on the head-up display (HUD) during the cruise phase. In this experiment, the increasing mental workload was associated with decreased accuracy rate of detecting abnormal information and longer reaction time. The frontal MMN was enhanced under the high mental workload condition whereas the temporal MMN was decreased, reflecting different information processing mechanisms. In addition, the eye blink rate, an additional assessment of mental workload, also showed high sensitivity and decreased significantly with the increase of mental workload. These results suggested that high mental workload might influence operator's pre-attentive change detection.