Monitoring of mental performance during spaceflight.

Mental performance of astronauts during spaceflight may suffer from both direct effects of microgravity on perceptual, cognitive, and psychomotor processes, and unspecific stress effects on these functions due to high workload sleep disturbances, or the general burden of adapting to the extreme living conditions in space. Early detection of any signs of mental performance impairments seems to be essential for mission success and to prevent obvious performance decrements in critical mission tasks. One possible approach to this problem is to assess the astronaut's performance on specific screening tests repeatedly during a space mission and to compare the results with a self-referenced baseline established pre-flight.