Short-term cardiovascular responses to changing task demands

When measuring operator states the predictive power of cardiovascular and respiratory measures in relation to mental workload has been questioned. One of the main questions is to what extent do cardiovascular measures actually reflect mental workload. This question arises because good measures of mental workload should be sensitive to changes in mental effort alone and not to other influences or at least the changes associated with mental workload should be easy to isolate. In the case of cardiovascular measures, the physiological change brought on by the baroreflex is a compensatory control effect that can potentially overshadow changes in physiology due to mental effort and therefore reduce the usefulness of cardiovascular measures. However, this does not need to be the case. Despite the effects caused by the baroreflex differences in heart rate, heart rate variability and other cardiovascular measures associated with task related effort can still be found using short-term response patterns. The short-segment analysis approach described in this paper is based on a time-frequency method in which the spectral power of the cardiovascular measures in specified spectral bands is computed from small time segments, i.e. 30 s. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique two studies which made use of a simulation of an ambulance dispatcher's task are described, both with easy and difficult task conditions. A short-lasting increase in task demand was found to be reflected in short-lasting increases in heart rate and blood pressure in combination with corresponding decreases in heart rate variability and blood pressure variability. These effects were larger in easy task conditions than in hard conditions, likely due to a higher overall effort-level during the hard task conditions. However, the developed measures are still very sensitive to mental effort and if this brief segmentation approach is used cardiovascular measures show promise as good candidates for reflecting mental effort during the assessment of operator state. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.