Cardiovascular Activity linked to the Emotional State and Cognitive Workload during a Flight Simulation

Abstract

The identification of physiological markers of emotional and cognitive fluctuations during a flight can be useful to alert of risky situations due to their possible impact on pilot’s mental state and performance. In this study, heart rate (HR) and other features, such as R-R peak interval variability and the spectral power of specific frequency bands, have been extracted from ECG recordings throughout flight simulations. The temporal variation of these features within different experimental conditions has been explored to verify their reliability to discriminate episodes of mental overload. Our results show that the monotonic decrease of HR reflects the emotional regulation, mainly under secondary low cognitive overload. Conversely, the increase of the root mean square successive differences was linked to higher cognitive workload situations. Furthermore, the habituation analysis reveals that these features are severely affected when an external cognitive demand