Fast & scrupulous: Gesture-based alarms improve accuracy and reaction times under various mental workload levels. An ERSP study.

In high-risk environments, fast and accurate responses to warning systems are essential to efficiently handle emergency situations. The aim of the present study was twofold: 1) investigating whether hand action videos (i.e., gesture alarms) trigger faster and more accurate responses than text alarm messages (i.e., written alarms), especially when mental workload (MWL) is high; and 2) investigating the brain activity in response to both types of alarms as a function of MWL. Regardless of MWL, participants (N = 28) were found to be both faster and more accurate when responding to gesture alarms than to written alarms. Brain electrophysiological results suggest that this greater efficiency might be due to a facilitation of the action execution, reflected by the decrease in mu and beta power observed around the response time window observed at C3 and C4 electrodes. These results suggest that gesture alarms may improve operators' performances in emergency situations.

Pushing open the door to reality: On facilitating the transitions from virtual to real environments.

The recent rise of virtual reality technology has led researchers to investigate how to adapt transitions to virtual environments. Transitions play a key role in facilitating the return to reality, which is of particular importance when the virtual world is far more agreeable than the real world. In the present study, the efficacy of a door transition - an almost "transparent" door falling out the top of the virtual environment and controlled by the user - was evaluated and compared to two basic transitions: a direct transition and a fading transition. Participants reported a strong preference for the door transition that was evaluated as being smoother, more controllable, and greatly facilitated the return to reality. Moreover, the results showed that the door transition triggered no greater sickness in participants than the two other types of transition.

Human Mirror Neuron System Based Alarms in the Cockpit: A Neuroergonomic Evaluation.

Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) events still remain among the deadliest accidents in aviation. When facing the possible occurrence of such an event, pilots have to immediately react to the ground proximity alarm ("Pull Up" alarm) in order to avoid the impending collision. However, the pilots' reaction to this alarm is not always optimal. This may be at least partly due to the low visual saliency of the current alarm and the deleterious effects of stress that alleviate the pilot's reactions. In the present study, two experiments (in a laboratory and in a flight simulator) were conducted to (1) investigate whether hand gesture videos (a hand pulling back the sidestick) can trigger brainwave frequencies related to the mirror neuron system; (2) determine whether enhancing the visual characteristics of the "Pull Up" alarm could improve pilots' response times. Electrophysiological results suggest that hand gesture videos attracted more participants' attention (greater alpha desynchronization in the parieto-occipital area) and possibly triggered greater activity of the mirror neuron system (greater mu and beta desynchronizations at central electrodes). Results obtained in the flight simulator revealed that enhancing the visual characteristics of the original "Pull Up" alarm improved the pilots' reaction times. However, no significant difference in reaction times between an enlarged "Pull Up" inscription and the hand gesture video was found. Further work is needed to determine whether mirror neuron system based alarms could bring benefits for flight safety, in particular, these alarms should be assessed during a high stress context.