Relative Severity of Human Performance Decrements Recorded in Rapid vs. Gradual Decompression.

Cabin decompression presents a threat in high-altitude-capable aircraft. A chamber study was performed to compare effects of rapid (RD) vs. gradual decompression and gauge impairment at altitude with and without hypoxia, as well as to assess recovery.

Contextual cueing during lethal force training: How target design and repetition can alter threat assessments.

Lethal force training requires individuals to make threat assessments, which involves holistic scenario processing to identify potential threats. Photorealistic targets can make threat/non-threat judgments substantially more genuine and challenging compared to simple cardboard or silhouette targets. Unfortunately, repeated target use also brings unintended consequences that could invalidate threat assessment processes conducted during training.

Personal Hypoxia Symptoms Vary Widely Within Individuals.

Exposure to high ambient altitudes above 10,000 ft (3048 m) over sea level during aviation can present the risk of hypobaric hypoxia. Hypoxia can impair sensory and cognitive functions, degrading performance and leading to mishaps. Military aircrew undergo regular hypoxia familiarization training to recognize their symptoms and understand the consequences of hypoxia.

Voluntary Urinary Retention Effects on Cognitive Performance.

Aircrew in-flight bladder relief remains an understudied stressor; specifically the effects of withholding urination on flight-relevant cognitive performance. This quasi-experimental study investigated whether voluntary urinary retention over a 3-h period negatively impacted cognitive performance. We assessed vigilance using the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) and measured the P3b event-related potential (ERP) in response to PVT stimuli.

Sex comparisons in physiological and cognitive performance during hypoxic challenge.

Within the tactical aviation community, human performance research lags in considering potential psychophysiological differences between male and female aviators due to little inclusion of females during the design and development of aircraft systems. A poor understanding of how male and female aviators differ with respect to human performance results in unknown potential sex differences on aeromedically relevant environmental stressors, perchance leading to suboptimal performance, safety, and health guidelines. For example, previous hypoxia studies have excluded female participants or lacked a sizeable sample to examine sex comparisons.

Effects of Acute Hypoxia on Early Visual and Auditory Evoked Potentials.

Reduced levels of environmental oxygen lead to hypoxic hypoxia and are a primary threat in tactical aviation. The visual system is particularly vulnerable to hypoxia, and its impairment can severely impact performance. The auditory system is relatively spared by hypoxia, although which stages of auditory processing are most impacted by hypoxia remains unclear.

Time course of recovery from acute hypoxia exposure as measured by vigilance and event-related potentials.

Exposure to reduced levels of breathable oxygen is known to cause a number of deleterious effects on human performance. Previous work has demonstrated that in healthy adults, hypoxia results in decrements on a wide range of sensory, cognitive, and motor tasks. However, very little is known about the time course of recovery of cognitive functions following a hypoxic exposure.

How unintentional cues can bias threat assessments during shoot/don't-shoot simulations.

Objective: Identify whether contextual information may unintentionally alter decision-making during lethal force training.

Background: Lethal force decisions inherently involve a threat assessment, where an individual learns to identify a threat and use force commensurate to the situation. This decision is ultimately subject to numerous cognitive influences, particularly during training where artificial factors may bias decision-making.

Modulation of Peak Alpha Frequency Oscillations During Working Memory Is Greater in Females Than Males.

Peak alpha frequency is known to vary not just between individuals, but also within an individual over time. While variance in this metric between individuals has been tied to working memory performance, less understood are how short timescale modulations of peak alpha frequency during task performance may facilitate behavior. This gap in understanding may be bridged by consideration of a key difference between individuals: sex.

Deficits in Visual Processing During Hypoxia as Evidenced by Visual Mismatch Negativity.

Hypoxia is an ever-present threat in tactical aviation and gained recent attention due to its putative role in physiological episodes. Previous work has demonstrated that hypoxia negatively impacts a variety of sensory, cognitive, and motor systems. In particular, the visual system is one of the earliest systems affected by hypoxia.

Measuring Lethal Force Performance in the Lab: The Effects of Simulator Realism and Participant Experience.

Objective: The goal of the current study was to compare two types of shooting simulators to determine which is best suited for assessing different aspects of lethal force performance.

Background: Military and law enforcement personnel are often required to make decisions regarding the use of lethal force. A critical goal of both training and research endeavors surrounding lethal force is to find ways to simulate lethal force encounters to better understand behavior in those scenarios.

Impaired Sensory Processing During Low-Oxygen Exposure: A Noninvasive Approach to Detecting Changes in Cognitive States.

The ability to detect novelty in our environment is a critical sensory function. A reliable set of event-related potentials (ERP), known as the auditory deviance response (ADR), are elicited in the absence of directed attention and indexes functionally relevant networks. The ADR consists of three peaks: mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, and reorienting negativity (RON) that are sequentially evoked in response to unattended changes in repetitive background stimulation.

N-back versus Complex Span Working Memory Training.

Working memory (WM) is the ability to maintain and manipulate task-relevant information in the absence of sensory input. While its improvement through training is of great interest, the degree to which WM training transfers to untrained WM tasks (near transfer) and other untrained cognitive skills (far transfer) remains debated and the mechanism(s) underlying transfer are unclear. Here we hypothesized that a critical feature of dual n-back training is its reliance on maintaining relational information in WM.

Frontoparietal neurostimulation modulates working memory training benefits and oscillatory synchronization.

There is considerable interest in maintaining working memory (WM) because it is essential to accomplish most cognitive tasks, and it is correlated with fluid intelligence and ecologically valid measures of daily living. Toward this end, WM training protocols aim to improve WM capacity and extend improvements to unpracticed domains, yet success is limited. One emerging approach is to couple WM training with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Keeping Track of Where We Are: Spatial Working Memory in Navigation.

Spatial working memory (WM) seems to include two types of spatial information, locations and relations. However, this distinction has been based on small-scale tasks. Here, we used a virtual navigation paradigm to examine whether WM for locations and relations applies to the large-scale spatial world.

Distinct Neural Substrates for Maintaining Locations and Spatial Relations in Working Memory.

Previous work has demonstrated a distinction between maintenance of two types of spatial information in working memory (WM): spatial locations and spatial relations. While a body of work has investigated the neural mechanisms of sensory-based information like spatial locations, little is known about how spatial relations are maintained in WM. In two experiments, we used fMRI to investigate the involvement of early visual cortex in the maintenance of spatial relations in WM.

The role of alpha oscillations in deriving and maintaining spatial relations in working memory.

Previous research has demonstrated distinct neural correlates for maintenance of abstract, relational versus concrete, sensory information in working memory (WM). Storage of spatial relations in WM results in suppression of posterior sensory regions, which suggests that sensory information is task-irrelevant when relational representations are maintained in WM. However, the neural mechanisms by which abstract representations are derived from sensory information remain unclear.

Effects of action video game training on visual working memory.

The ability to hold visual information in mind over a brief delay is critical for acquiring information and navigating a complex visual world. Despite the ubiquitous nature of visual working memory (VWM) in our everyday lives, this system is fundamentally limited in capacity. Therefore, the potential to improve VWM through training is a growing area of research.

Maintenance of relational information in working memory leads to suppression of the sensory cortex.

Working memory (WM) for sensory-based information about individual objects and their locations appears to involve interactions between lateral prefrontal and sensory cortexes. The mechanisms and representations for maintenance of more abstract, nonsensory information in WM are unknown, particularly whether such actively maintained information can become independent of the sensory information from which it was derived. Previous studies of WM for individual visual items found increased electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha (8-13 Hz) power over posterior electrode sites, which appears to correspond to the suppression of cortical areas that represent irrelevant sensory information.

Regional peak mucosal cooling predicts the perception of nasal patency.

Objectives/hypothesis: Nasal obstruction is the principal symptom that drives patients with rhinosinus disease to seek medical treatment. However, patient perception of obstruction often bears little relationship to actual measured physical obstruction of airflow. This lack of an objective clinical tool hinders effective diagnosis and treatment.

Enhanced visual short-term memory in action video game players.

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is critical for acquiring visual knowledge and shows marked individual variability. Previous work has illustrated a VSTM advantage among action video game players (Boot et al. Acta Psychologica 129:387-398, 2008).

Disrupting perceptual grouping of face parts impairs holistic face processing.

Face perception is widely believed to involve integration of facial features into a holistic perceptual unit, but the mechanisms underlying this integration are relatively unknown. We examined whether perceptual grouping cues influence a classic marker of holistic face perception, the "composite-face effect." Participants made same-different judgments about a cued part of sequentially presented chimeric faces, and holistic processing was indexed as the degree to which the task-irrelevant face halves impacted performance.

Perceiving nasal patency through mucosal cooling rather than air temperature or nasal resistance.

Adequate perception of nasal airflow (i.e., nasal patency) is an important consideration for patients with nasal sinus diseases.

Acceptance-versus change-based pain management: the role of psychological acceptance.

This study compared two theoretically opposed strategies for acute pain management: an acceptance-based and a change-based approach. These two strategies were compared in a within-subjects design using the cold pressor test as an acute pain induction method. Participants completed a baseline pain tolerance assessment followed by one of the two interventions and another pain tolerance test.