Pre-stimulus EEG engagement ratio predicts inattentional deafness to auditory alarms in realistic flight simulator

Abstract

Accidents analyses and research conducted in simulated or real flight conditions indicated that inattentional deafness (ID) to auditory alarms could take place in the cockpit [1, 3]. Previous findings indicated that single trial event related potentials analyses over the electrophysiological signals could be used to detect ID [6]. However, a more relevant approach to improve flight safety would be to predict the occurrence of this phenomenon, thus paving the way to the design of “adaptive cockpit”. To that end, a relevant approach is to measure shift in neural oscillations as a measure of atten- tion [2]. In the present study, we propose to predict ID in a flight simulator by assessing the engagement ratio computed from pre-stimulus EEG signals. This ratio aggregates three main frequency bands (alpha, beta, theta) [5] and has been shown to be related to episodes of ID [4].