Cognitive Cost Assessment in Aeronautical Tasks: New Objective and Sensitive Method

Abstract: The future fighter aircraft (e.g., Next Generation Fighter, central element of the Futur Combat Air System) are being developed in response to evolving conflicts in the Multi-Domain context. AI-based onboard systems will be limited in their tasks for technical and/or ethical reasons, thus leaving some tasks to be managed by the aircrew. Alongside these tasks is the overall management of the onboard system, further increasing an already high cognitive cost. Assessing this cognitive cost would help identify particularly costly tasks and develop training and human-system interfaces accordingly.This study aims to validate a method for evaluating cognitive cost using the complex span task protocol (Barrouillet & Camos, 2007) on basic aeronautical tasks performed by novices early in their training. The complex span task protocol involves alternating between memorization and processing. In this experiment, processing tasks correspond to two flight phases: a low difficulty phase (i.e., flight legs) and a high difficulty phase (i.e., turns at waypoints). The cost is measured by asking participants to perform a letter memorization task in a flight simulator during these flight phases. The number of letters recalled in the correct order determines the participants' complex span in each experimental condition (i.e., the higher the number of letters, the better the complex span, the lower the cognitive cost), interpreted as an indicator of the current task's cognitive cost.In addition to the test group (N=16), which performs both aeronautical and memorization tasks, a control group (N=14) is subjected only to the memorization task. Results show that the control group's complex span is better than that of the test group, indicating a lower cognitive cost. Within the test group, the complex span is better during the low difficulty phase than during the complex phase. These results indicate that the phase identified as high difficulty is more cognitively costly than the phase identified as low difficulty, with both phases indicating a higher cognitive cost than the memorization task performed alone. Taken together, the results suggest that evaluating performance on a complex span task during a simulated flight could provide an objective and sensitive indicator distinguishing variation in the cognitive cost of aeronautical tasks.Thus, this method has the advantage of being time-efficient and non-invasive, surpassing current limitations of measuring cognitive cost through physiological sensors (e.g., eye-trackers, electromyograms, or electrocardiograms).Consequently, such a method of cognitive cost evaluation could be extended to a wider range of more complex aeronautical tasks (e.g., spatial orientation changes, onboard system management). This task identification could lead to proposed methods for reducing what is identified as costly.

Keywords: cognitive load, cognitive cost evaluation, complex span, aeronautic

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005696

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