Concurrent Prediction of Performance-Critical Cognitive States from Physiological Signals
Conference Proceeding
Overview
abstract
Crew behavioral health is critical to spaceflight mission; success. As future missions move further from Earth, crews; will have to rely less on ground control for support. In; its place, novel methods to monitor, understand, and; respond to changes in their behavioral health could inform; the timing of full cognitive assessments or automated; crew-resource management decisions. Physiological signals; offer a non-disruptive, objective method for capturing; continuous information about crew cognitive state; however,; limited work has evaluated predictive performance from; combinations of these signals. In this work, we collected a; multimodal suite of neurophysiological,; psychophysiological, and behavioral signals from 31; participants (16F) while they completed the Multi-Attribute; Task Battery II. Additionally, we collected gold-standard; or proxy measures of cognitive states, including workload,; attentional allocation, working memory, vigilance, and; engagement. We present predictive models of these measures; along a continuum and validate model performance on unseen; data. For instance, we predict overall weighted NASA TLX; scores on a continuous 100-point scale with mean absolute; error (MAE) of 11.22 and with a Q2 of 0.47. To evaluate; baseline model performance, we shuffle our TLX labels to; align them with unrelated physiology, and we show that MAE; increases (worsens) to 13.95 and Q2 decreases (worsens) to; -0.31. We present predictive features and their; coefficients, including respiratory tidal volume,; oxygenated prefrontal hemoglobin, and deoxygenated; prefrontal hemoglobin. Model type and performance metric; necessarily change based on dependent variable, and we; discuss the implications of these different strategies and; performance metrics. Overall results show that; physiological signals could provide critical insight into a; crew’s cognitive state where other methods may prove; impractical or infeasible.
