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.

Investigating the impact of offer frame manipulations on responders playing the ultimatum game.

The present study was designed to test the impact of frame manipulations on the decision-making of responders playing the ultimatum game. Experiment 1 investigated responders' event-related potentials (ERPs) measured in response to the offers as a function of the frame (i.e., negative: "the proposer keeps" versus positive: "the proposer offers"). While no difference in acceptation rate was found as a function of the offer's frame, electrophysiological results suggest that the stronger negative affective response to the offers in the negative frame (N400) was successfully reappraised by the responders (P600), possibly explaining why the offer frame manipulation did not modulate acceptation rates. No framing effect was found when the ultimatum game was played in its one-shot version (Experiment 2), suggesting that repeated measurements did not affect responders' behavior. However, an offer framing effect was found in female (but not in male) responders, when the complexity of the game statement increased, presumably recruiting more cognitive resources and taxing the reappraisal process (Experiment 3). Taken together, these results suggest that framing manipulations are associated with complex affective and cognitive processes, supporting the cognitive-affective tradeoff model.

Busy and confused? High risk of missed alerts in the cockpit: An electrophysiological study.

The ability to react to unexpected auditory stimuli is critical in complex settings such as aircraft cockpits or air traffic control towers, characterized by high mental load and highly complex auditory environments (i.e., many different auditory alerts). Evidence shows that both factors can negatively impact auditory attention and prevent appropriate reactions. In the present study, 60 participants performed a simulated aviation task varying in terms of mental load (no, low, high) concurrently to a tone detection paradigm in which the complexity of the auditory environment (i.e., auditory load) was manipulated (1, 2 or 3 different tones). We measured both detection performance (miss, false alarm, d') and brain activity (event-related potentials) associated with the target tone. Our results showed that both mental and auditory loads affected target tone detection performance. Importantly, their combined effects had a large impact on the percentage of missed target tones. While, in the no mental load condition, miss rate was very low with 1 (0.53%) and 2 tones (1.11%), it increased drastically with 3 tones (24.44%), and this effect was accentuated as mental load increased, yielding to the higher miss rate in the 3-tone paradigm under high mental load conditions (68.64%). Increased mental and auditory loads and miss rates were associated with disrupted brain responses to the target tone, as shown by a reduced P3b amplitude. In sum, our results highlight the importance of balancing mental and auditory loads to maintain efficient reactions to alarms in complex working environment.

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.

Being the chosen one: social inclusion modulates decisions in the ultimatum game. An ERP study.

In the present study, participants played a modified ultimatum game simulating a situation of inclusion/exclusion, in which either the participant or a rival could be selected to play as the responder. This selection was made either randomly by a computer (i.e. random pairing mode) or by the proposer (i.e. choice mode), based on physical appearance. Being chosen by the proposer triggered positive reciprocal behavior in participants, who accepted unfair offers more frequently than when they had been selected by the computer. Independently of selection mode, greater P200 amplitudes were found when participants received fair offers than when they received unfair offers and when unfair shares were offered to their rivals rather than to them, suggesting that receiving fair offers or observing a rival's misfortune was rewarding for participants. While participants generally showed more interest in the offers they themselves received (i.e. greater P300 responses to these offers), observing their rivals receive fair shares after the latter had been chosen by the proposer triggered an increase in P300 amplitude likely to reflect a feeling of envy. This study provides new insights into both the cognitive and affective processes underpinning economic decision making in a context of social inclusion/exclusion.

High Working Memory Load Impairs Language Processing during a Simulated Piloting Task: An ERP and Pupillometry Study.

Given the important amount of visual and auditory linguistic information that pilots have to process, operating an aircraft generates a high working-memory load (WML). In this context, the ability to focus attention on relevant information and to remain responsive to concurrent stimuli might be altered. Consequently, understanding the effects of WML on the processing of both linguistic targets and distractors is of particular interest in the study of pilot performance. In the present work, participants performed a simplified piloting task in which they had to follow one of three colored aircraft, according to specific written instructions (i.e., the written word for the color corresponding to the color of one of the aircraft) and to ignore either congruent or incongruent concurrent auditory distractors (i.e., a spoken name of color). The WML was manipulated with an n-back sub-task. Participants were instructed to apply the current written instruction in the low WML condition, and the 2-back written instruction in the high WML condition. Electrophysiological results revealed a major effect of WML at behavioral (i.e., decline of piloting performance), electrophysiological, and autonomic levels (i.e., greater pupil diameter). Increased WML consumed resources that could not be allocated to the processing of the linguistic stimuli, as indexed by lower P300/P600 amplitudes. Also, significantly, lower P600 responses were measured in incongruent vs. congruent trials in the low WML condition, showing a higher difficulty reorienting attention toward the written instruction, but this effect was canceled in the high WML condition. This suppression of interference in the high load condition is in line with the engagement/distraction trade-off model. We propose that P300/P600 components could be reliable indicators of WML and that they allow an estimation of its impact on the processing of linguistic stimuli.

The Responders' Gender Stereotypes Modulate the Strategic Decision-Making of Proposers Playing the Ultimatum Game.

Despite the wealth of studies investigating factors affecting decisions, not much is known about the impact of stereotypical beliefs on strategic economic decision-making. In the present study, we used the ultimatum game paradigm to investigate how participants playing as proposer modulate their strategic economic behavior, according to their game counterparts' stereotypical identity (i.e., responders). The latter were introduced to the participants using occupational role nouns stereotypically marked with gender paired with feminine or masculine proper names (e.g., linguist-Anna; economist-David; economist-Cristina; linguist-Leonardo). When playing with male-stereotyped responders, proposers quickly applied the equity rule, behaving fairly, while they adopted a strategic behavior with responders characterized by female stereotypes. They were also longer to make their offers to female than to male responders but both kinds of responders received comparable offers, suggesting a greater cognitive effort to treat females as equally as males. The present study explicitly demonstrates that gender stereotypical information affect strategic economic decision-making and highlights a possible evolution of gender discrimination into a more insidious discrimination toward individuals with female characteristics.

Sex and the money--How gender stereotypes modulate economic decision-making: An ERP study.

In the present event-related potential study, we investigated whether and how participants playing the ultimatum game as responders modulate their decisions according to the proposers' stereotypical identity. The proposers' identity was manipulated using occupational role nouns stereotypically marked with gender (e.g., Teacher; Engineer), paired with either feminine or masculine proper names (e.g., Anna; David). Greater FRN amplitudes reflected the early processing of the conflict between the strategic rule (i.e., earning as much money as possible) and ready-to-go responses (i.e., refusing unequal offers and discriminating proposers according to their stereotype). Responders were found to rely on a dual-process system (i.e., automatic and heuristic-based system 1 vs. cognitively costly and deliberative system 2), the P300 amplitude reflecting the switch from a decision making system to another. Greater P300 amplitudes were found in response to both fair and unfair offers and male-stereotyped proposers' offers reflecting an automatic decision making based on heuristics, while lower P300 amplitudes were found in response to 3€ offers and the female-stereotyped proposers' offers reflecting a more deliberative reasoning. Overall, the results indicate that participants were more motivated to engage in a costly deliberative reasoning associated with an increase in acceptation rate when playing with female-stereotyped proposers, who may have induced more positive and emphatic feelings in the participants than did male-stereotyped proposers. Then, we assume that people with an occupation stereotypically marked with female gender and engaged in an economic negotiation may benefit from their occupation at least in the case their counterparts lose their money if the negotiation fails.

Olfactory conditioning of the sting extension reflex in honeybees: Memory dependence on trial number, interstimulus interval, intertrial interval, and protein synthesis.

Harnessed bees learn to associate an odorant with an electric shock so that afterward the odorant alone elicits the sting extension response (SER). We studied the dependency of retention on interstimulus interval (ISI), intertrial interval (ITI), and number of conditioning trials in the framework of olfactory SER conditioning. Forward ISIs (conditioned stimulus [CS] before unconditioned stimulus [US]) supported higher retention than a backward one (US before CS) with an optimum around 3 sec. Spaced trials (ITI 10 min) supported higher retention than massed trials (ITI 1 min) and led to the formation of a late long-term memory (l-LTM) that depended on protein synthesis. Our results reaffirm olfactory SER conditioning as a reliable tool for the study of learning and memory.