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SPOKANE – Researchers from WSU Spokane’s Sleep and Performance Research Center have been awarded a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to develop a computational model predicting the precise effects of fatigue on cognitive performance tasks.
The $784,023 grant provides three years of funding for the project. Principal investigator Hans Van Dongen and co-principal investigator Gregory Belenky will collaborate with the Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a model that will facilitate operational planning and targeting of fatigue countermeasures to minimize human error and maximize success during Air Force missions and other 24/7 operations.
“We know that fatigue causes cognitive deficits, but we don’t know what exactly goes wrong during a given performance task, and how that happens,” said Belenky.
Although models for predicting the effects of fatigue have been developed previously, they do not differentiate between the separate components of cognition and therefore do not reveal much about the expected performance on a specific task. To develop their new model, Van Dongen and Belenky will connect the Air Force Research Laboratory’s computational models of cognitive function to the researchers’ own state-of-the-art mathematical models of the biological factors that drive fatigue.
“With a model to predict how fatigue affects specific cognitive functions, we can calculate in advance the precise odds of human error due to fatigue and suggest countermeasures or schedule changes to improve performance and safety,” said Van Dongen.
Sleep and Performance Research Center
WSU’s Sleep and Performance Research Center includes a state-of-the-art human sleep research laboratory located on the Riverpoint Campus at WSU Spokane, and two world-class basic sleep research laboratories on WSU’s main campus in Pullman. The human sleep research laboratory is funded entirely with extramural grants and contracts, and accommodates carefully controlled experiments to study the effects of sleep and sleep loss on human cognitive functioning. With the recent addition of a critical job task simulation laboratory, the center’s facility in Spokane is the only one of its kind in the world.
