Auditory alarm misperception in the cockpit: An EEG study of inattentional deafness

Abstract

Missing auditory alarms is a critical safety issue in many domains such as aviation. To investigate this phenomenon, we designed a scenario involving three flying scenarios corresponding to three different level of difficulty along with an oddball paradigm in a motion flight simulator. This preliminary study was conducted with one pilot equipped with a 32-channel EEG. The results shown that manipulating the three levels of task difficulty led respectively to rates of 0, 37, and 54% missed alarms. The EEG analyses revealed that this decrease in performance was associated with lower spectral power within the alpha band and reduced N100 component amplitude. This latter finding suggested the involvement of inattentional deafness mechanisms at an early stage of the auditory processing. Eventually, we implemented a processing chain to enhance the discriminability of ERPs for mental state monitoring purposes. The results indicated that this chain could be used in a quite ecological setting (i.e. three-axis motion flight simulator) as attested by the good results obtained for the oddball task, but also for more subtle mental states such as mental demand and stress level and the detection of target, that is to say the inattentional deafness phenomenon.