Applications

Abstract

In this chapter, some industrial applications are described. In particular, for the investigation of the different mental states (mental workload, cognitive control behavior, and training), the triangulation approach has been used (Bekhet and Zauszniewski in JAMA 20: 40–43, 2012; Jick in JAMA 24: 602–611, 1979). In other words, information coming from different sources, such as behavioral data, self-reported questionnaires, neurophysiological signals, were combined in order to better analyze and evaluate the considered cognitive phenomena. Multimodal approaches are very important for avoiding wrong interpretation of the results. For example, the users could achieve high performance in terms of task execution, but show high mental demand from a cognitive perspective when dealing with the task itself. For each mental status, preliminary experiments were performed in controlled settings (i.e., Lab), and then the second phase of the experiments has been run in more ecological contexts. Thus, the purpose of the following studies was to investigate the effectiveness of the developed methodologies, and to define specific neurometrics for the analysis of the considered mental states.