Experimental Study On Assessment Criteria For Judging Healthy Youths' Cognitive Ability

It is one of the most important issues to monitor and prevent flight fatigue in the field of aerospace medicine. Fatigue, lack of sleep, and circadian disruption caused by long-haul, irregular, night and crossing time zone flight operations can degrade performance, alertness and safety. The aim of this study is to find changing regulation of aircrew's basic mentality ability such as memory, sense, attention span and instant decision-making ability by means of testing their abilities. Moreover, it will help evaluating operational persons objectively, scientifically, accurately and systematically. In order to prevent flight accident and to ensure flight safety, criteria for selecting civil aviation aircrew by testing their basic applicable ability must be established. By means of dynamic monitoring of the aircrew's flight capability, their physical and psychological conditions can be found, which will ensure flight safety and accident prevention.We design some corresponding test items based on airplane pilots' mostly behavior after their fatigue, their professional request and their practical circs. These tests must be sensitive to flight ability, short time cost and with good reliability, validity and distinction, small studying effect, brief maneuverability. Various capability tests were designed to examine the basic ability of flight,involving reasoning, deductive, reaction, memorization, attention, comprehension, visualization, spatial orientation, perceptual speed etc.According to the request and characteristics, we designed 6 tests, which names and main purposes were as follows:(l)The Spatial Circumgyrate Test (SCT):To examine the ability of space cognition, judgment and inference.(2)The Numeral Plus Photic Point Test (NPPPT)To examine the ability of short-term memory, calculation ability and attention distribution and choices.(3) The Planar Numeric Hunting Test (PNHT):To examine the ability of attention concentration, selective agility, inverse ordinal number information distillation and the best decision.(4) The Paired-Word Matching Test (PWMT):To examine the ability of Chinese phrase comprehension and description.(5)The Hiding Graphic Test (HGT):To examine the ability of spaceimagination, deduction and visualize ideation(6)The Speed Estimates Test (SET):To examine the ability of space cognition of distance and prejudgment as pilotTest indexes: Accuracy and response time are two indexes most common and accepted in psychological ability tests. Statistical analysis of these two indexes can indicate the mental ability state of the aircrew. In this way we can improve the mental health of the aircrew.At the same time," Multy-valid standard system" is one of the newest and most important standpoints concerning about valid theories in the psychological test. It has been researched that the credibility of the one" valid standard" is limited, which will usually result in mistake judgment. Otherwise tests which are invalidation or low-grade validation will be regarded useful by mistake. In the later 10 years, " Multy-valid standard system" has been accepted and practiced in the personality tests. According to the theory, we are to provide relativemethods and idiographic index to judge the mentation of the aircrew by the way which combines subjective experience and impersonal assessment. The Self Scale Measure of Fatigue(SSMOF) that is used to assess the driving man self fatigue has been reported in a great deal of reference, which can be used for subjective self evaluating test to assess mental workload.The main results are as follows:1. Among six ability tests, the results from these 4 tests involving SCT, NPPPT, PNHT, SET have shown that under the different condition, the index of reaction time(RT) and right rate(RR) are significantly different. However the results from PWMT and HGT are not highly satisfactory.2. According the relativity analysis between self scale measure of fatigue and ability tests, the correlation coefficient of SSMOF and SCT, NPPPT, PNHT, SET, PWMT, HGT is 0.446,-0.046,-0.008,-0.088, 0.159, 0.043. This result shows that SSMOF is some certain extent worthy to assessing fatigue subjectively.The research conclusion of attention character assessment on mental fatigue:1. There are obviously expressed that these tests are sensitive to the special ability request of pilots' mental fatigue. These tests can evaluate pilots' mental status sensitively by the corresponding technique disposal.2. The indexes of physiology are not significantly correlative, which is not sensitive to judge healthy young's mental fatigue.3. Different cognitive tests had different sensitivity to pilots. The SCT NPPPT. PNHT SET, which were difficult and long, could react the affection of cognitive abilities during mental fatigue. Whereas the PWMT and HGT, which they were easy and short, could not show significant affection.Generally speaking, this research has shown that the fatigue assessment can't to be carried on by single index , but by multilayer, multi-angle and several indexes to put up assessment at the same time. Because of the limited condition, the present research involves only the cognitive attention characteristic and subjective assessable method of the mental fatigue. The methods set up in the...