Selection of Psychophysiological Features Across Subjects for Classifying Workload Using Artificial Neural Networks

<p>The issue of pilot workload is important to the United States Air Force because pilot overload or task saturation leads to decreases in mission effectiveness. Additionally in the most extreme cases pilot overload may lead to the loss of aircraft and crewmember lives. Current research efforts are utilizing psychophysiological data including electroencephalography (EEG) cardiac eye-blink and respiration measures in attempt to identify workload levels. The primary focus of this effort is to determine if a single parsimonious set of psychophysiological features exists for accurately classifying workload levels between multiple test subjects. To accomplish this objective the signal-to-noise (SNR) saliency measure is used to determine the usefulness of psychophysiological features in feedforward artificial neural networks (ANNs). The SNR saliency measure determines the saliency or relative value of a feature by comparing it to a feature of injected noise. For this effort 36 psychophysiological features were derived from the data collected as each subject completed simulated crewmember tasks using the Multi-Attribute Task Battery developed by NASA. These tasks were randomly presented to the subjects in blocks with three distinct levels: low medium and an overload level in which subjects could not complete all tasks.</p><p>This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore you will see the original copyright references library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world) and other notations in the work.</p><p>This work is in the public domain in the United States of America and possibly other nations. Within the United States you may freely copy and distribute this work as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.</p><p>As a reproduction of a historical artifact this work may contain missing or blurred pages poor pictures errant marks etc. Scholars believe and we concur that this work is important enough to be preserved reproduced and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.</p>