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Commercial airline cockpit crews flying transoceanic routes were tested repeatedly with a battery of cognitive tests implemented on a lap-top microcomputer. Testing was conducted before departure and during the early, middle, and late periods in flight on the outbound leg of four flight pairings. The same tests were administered on the return leg(s) of each flight pairing but, just prior to final administration of the tests, six minutes of moderate resistance exercise was undertaken by the Captain and one other pilot (either the First or Second Officer). The remaining officer substituted a walk around the aircraft cabin for exercise and served as a control. The same Flight Captain was available for testing on all flights (N = 22), but due to scheduling requirements, the same First and Second Officers were available for 4-8 flights each. Comparisons were made between the two exercise conditions over all test sessions, but no statistical relationships were found.

In this study four experiments were conducted aimed at creating an objective physiologic metric of operator workload by comparing subjective and objective measures of performance. Thirty-four participants completed a series of computer-based tasks and the NASA-TLX workload metric. Neuroelectric eye movement indices (e.g., blink, velocity) were then collected using a subset of these tasks. In general, the results were very good. Eye movement indices during performance on the computer-based tasks showed some statistical significance. A current study is underway to further examine eye movement indices as an objective physiologic metric.