Utilizing functional near-infrared spectroscopy for prediction of cognitive workload in noisy work environments.

Mary Fendley,Nasser H Kashou,Rik Warren,Irfaan A Dar,Ryan Gabbard

doi:10.1117/1.nph.4.4.041406

Mary Fendley, Nasser H Kashou + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1117/1.nph.4.4.041406

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Abstract

.Occupational noise frequently occurs in the work environment in military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations. This impacts cognitive performance by acting as a stressor, potentially interfering with the analysts’ decision-making process. We investigated the effects of different noise stimuli on analysts’ performance and workload in anomaly detection by simulating a noisy work environment. We utilized functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to quantify oxy-hemoglobin (HbO) and deoxy-hemoglobin concentration changes in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), as well as behavioral measures, which include eye tracking, reaction time, and accuracy rate. We hypothesized that noisy environments would have a negative effect on the participant in terms of anomaly detection performance due to the increase in workload, which would be reflected by an increase in PFC activity. We found that HbO for some of the channels analyzed were significantly different across noise types (). Our results also indicated that HbO activation for short-intermittent noise stimuli was greater in the PFC compared to long-intermittent noises. These approaches using fNIRS in conjunction with an understanding of the impact on human analysts in anomaly detection could potentially lead to better performance by optimizing work environments.

Highlights

The ever-increasing rate of object identification through automation outpaces the ability of human analysts to process the captured images and has become an increasingly time-critical task.[1,2] Analysts must be able to discern signals from noise that can lead to four possible decisions: hit, miss, false alarm, and correct rejection.[3]
This study aimed to assess the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signal activation at the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in adults during visual search tasks in various noise-filled environments to simulate the workload of an ISR analyst
The salient findings of our study both partially support and go against our hypothesis that PFC activity would increase as a result of a noise stimulus during a visual target search task

Summary

Introduction

The ever-increasing rate of object identification through automation outpaces the ability of human analysts to process the captured images and has become an increasingly time-critical task.[1,2] Analysts must be able to discern signals (targets) from noise that can lead to four possible decisions: hit, miss, false alarm, and correct rejection.[3]. Noise impacts cognitive performance by acting as a stressor, which could interfere with the analysts’ decision-making process.[7] It has been welldocumented that occupational noise has a negative impact on job satisfaction.[8,9,10,11] Previous studies have shown that noise stress has a negative effect on attention, working memory, and episodic recall. It has been shown that the effect of noise varies based on task complexity. Studies have shown that noise has no effect on simple tasks but does play a factor in more complex tasks.[12] Theories have been proposed to explain why there is a tendency for people to perform better in silence compared to an environment that contains background noise.[13,14] One such theory is that background noise captures

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