Sébastien Scannella

Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace (ISAE) | ISAE · Aeronautics and Space Centre (CAS)

Operating an aircraft is a cognitively challenging task in which pilots have to continuously monitor flight deck instruments. The present study attempts to find out whether eye movements are indicative of different monitoring activities within the flight phases. Eleven pilots, equipped with a head-mounted eye tracker on board of a Robin DR-400 ligh...

The human brain networks responsible for selectively listening to a voice amid other talkers remain to be clarified. The present study aimed to investigate relationships between cortical activity and performance in a speech-in-speech task, before (Experiment I) and after training-induced improvements (Experiment II). In Experiment I, 74 participant...

Interest for neuromodulation, and transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) in particular, is growing. It concerns patients rehabilitation, but also healthy people who want or need to improve their cognitive and learning abilities. However, there is no consensus yet regarding the efficacy of tRNS on learning and performing a complex task. In par...

Performance in complex tasks is essential for many high risk operators. The achievement of such tasks is supported by high-level cognitive functions arguably involving functional activity and connectivity in a large ensemble of brain areas that form the fronto-parietal network. Here we aimed at determining whether the functional connectivity at res...

To follow a conversation in a noisy environment is a real challenge that affects the listening effort and the associated cognitive workload. In a previous work, a speech intelligibility task was performed while prefrontal cortex activity was recorded with a functional near infrared spectroscopy (f/NIRS) system. The conditions of the target-masker-r...

There has been a considerable amount of research to conceptualize how cognition handle multitasking situations. Despite these efforts,it is still not clear how task parameters shape attentionnal resources allocation. For instance, many research have suggested that difficulty levels could explain these conflicting observations and very few have cons...

Recent technological progress has allowed the development of low-cost and highly portable brain sensors such as pre-amplified dry-electrodes to measure cognitive activity out of the laboratory. This technology opens promising perspectives to monitor the "brain at work" in complex real-life situations such as while operating aircraft. However, there...

Inattentional deafness can have deleterious consequences in complex real-life situations (e.g. healthcare, aviation) leading to miss critical auditory signals. Such failure of auditory attention is thought to rely on top-down biasing mechanisms at the central executive level. A complementary approach to account for this phenomenon is to consider th...

Background. Accidents analyses and research conducted in simulated or real flight conditions indicated that inattentional deafness (ID) to auditory alarms could take place in the cockpit [1, 3]. Previous findings indicated that single trial event related potentials analyses over the electrophysiological signals could be used to detect ID [6]. Howev...

Background. Accidents analyses and research conducted in simulated or real flight conditions indicated that inattentional deafness (ID) to auditory alarms could take place in the cockpit [1, 3]. Previous findings indicated that single trial event related potentials analyses over the electrophysiological signals could be used to detect ID [6]. Howev...

Objective: The purpose of the present study was to find psychophysiological proxies that are straightforward to use and could be implemented in actual flight conditions to accurately discriminate pilots' workload levels. Background: Piloting an aircraft is a complex activity where cognitive limitations may jeopardize flight safety. There is a ne...

Unstabilized approach has been identified to be a major causal factor of approach-and-landing accidents (e.g. off-runway touchdowns, hard landing, tail-strikes, etc). We conducted an experiment in order to analyze pilots’ performance during such approaches. Ten type-rated, commercial pilots flew each in a B737 full-flight simulator during an unstab...

In the aeronautics field, some authors have suggested that an aircraft's attitude sonification could be used by pilots to cope with spatial disorientation situations. Such a system is currently used by blind pilots to control the attitude of their aircraft. However, given the suspected higher auditory attentional capacities of blind people, the pos...

In a multi-talker situation, spatial separation between talkers reduces cognitive processing load: this is the “spatial release of cognitive load”. The present study investigated the role played by the relative levels of the talkers on this spatial release of cognitive load. During the experiment, participants had to report the speech emitted by a...

Missing auditory alarms is a critical safety issue in many domains such as aviation. To investigate this phenomenon, we designed a scenario involving three flying scenarios corresponding to three different level of difficulty along with an oddball paradigm in a motion flight simulator. This preliminary study was conducted with one pilot equipped wi...

Basic knowledge about electroencephalography origins and measurements

Working memory (WM) is a key executive function for operating aircraft, especially when pilots have to recall series of air traffic control instructions. There is a need to implement tools to monitor WM as its limitation may jeopardize flight safety. An innovative way to address this issue is to adopt a Neuroergonomics approach that merges knowledg...

The event-related potential N270 component is known to be an electrophysiological marker of the supramodal conflict processing. However little is know about the factors that may modulate its amplitude. In particular, among all studies that have investigated the N270, little or no control of the conflict strength and of the load in working memory ha...

Introduction While conflict between instructions and distractors makes normally reactions slower, right inferior parietal lobule (IPL) damage associated with left spatial neglect leads, in a visuomotor task, to the paradoxical facilitation of rightwards movements in the presence of conflicting leftward response plans (Coulthard et al., 2008). We in...

Cognitive load is a key factor in understanding speech communication in adverse situation. Here, we explored the effect of cognitive load in a classical cocktail- party paradigm. A speech-in-speech intelligibility task was performed using the coordinate response measure (CRM) corpus. The influences of target-to-masker ratio (TMR; -12 dB, -4 dB,...

Conflicts between the pilot and the automation, when pilots detect but do not understand them, cause "automation surprise" situations and jeopardize flight safety. We conducted an experiment in a 3-axis motion flight simulator with 16 pilots equipped with an eye-tracker to analyze their behavior and eye movements during the occurrence of such a sit...

Working memory is a key executive function for flying an aircraft. This function is particularly critical when pilots have to recall series of air traffic control instructions. However, working memory limitations may jeopardize flight safety. Since the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) method seems promising for assessing working memory...

An analysis of airplane accidents reveals that pilots sometimes purely fail to react to critical auditory alerts. This inability of an auditory stimulus to reach consciousness has been coined under the term of inattentional deafness. Recent data from literature tends to show that tasks involving high cognitive load consume most of the attentional c...

Real-time solutions for noise reduction and signal processing represent a central challenge for the development of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI). In this paper, we introduce the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) filter, a tunable digital passband filter for online noise reduction and onset detection without preliminary learning phase,...

The number of airplane accidents that occurred during the past few decades encouraged scientists to take a close look at human behavior in the context of usual aeronautical situations. What came out of those studies was that, in particularly demanding situations, such as take off or landing parts, pilots were prone to missing critical auditory alar...

Context: Using natural connected speech, the aim of the present study was to examine the semantic congruity effect (i.e. the difference between semantically incongruous and congruous words) in sentence contexts that generate high or moderate final word expectancies. Methods: We used sentences with two levels of word expectancy in the auditory mo...

Design of future systems for flight-deck automation will reflect a trend of changing the paradigm of human-computer interaction from the master (human)- slave (machine) mode to more equilibrated cooperation. In many cases such cooperation considers several humans and computer systems, for which multi-agent dynamic cooperative systems are appropriat...

The human cognitive system receives environmental information through multiple sensory channels. Most of the time, the channels provide congruent content, the integration of which helps build an unified perception of the world, but sometimes the environment provides inconsistent stimuli that perturb efficient interpretation. These situations gener...