Photo By Megan Mudersbach | Naval Medical Research Unit Dayton’s (NAMRU-Dayton) research psychologist, Dr. F....... read more read more
By: Dr. F. Eric Robinson, research psychologist, NAMRU-Dayton
The Naval Medical Research Unit Dayton (NAMRU-Dayton) is engaged in promising research to help reduce the risk of a leading cause of Class A mishaps within the Department of Defense – one that kills pilots and destroys assets every year – spatial disorientation.
Spatial disorientation, or SD, occurs when pilots misperceive the position or attitude of their aircraft relative to the earth or other objects. Part of the reason that SD is such a persistent problem is that the flight environment can mislead our sensory systems, which evolved to handle ground-based inputs. Degraded visual conditions or misleading gravitational cues can interact with high mental workload to degrade situational awareness and increase the risk of a mishap.
NAMRU-Dayton’s Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory (NAMRL) addresses a number of aircrew issues including cognitive aspects of SD prevention and mitigation. I am leading two research efforts in the lab; one seeks to characterize basic perceptual contributors to SD, and the other will develop and test a training intervention to help pilots manage attention during periods of high workload.
The first study is a Navy In-house Laboratory Independent Research (ILIR)-sponsored effort in collaboration with Dr. Daniel Merfeld, senior vestibular scientist at NAMRU-Dayton and Vice-Chair of Research in the Department of Otolaryngology at Ohio State University. We are looking at volitional influences on vestibular perception to characterize basic perceptual contributors to SD. Essentially, results will help us better understand how pilots process and interpret vestibular cues.
Most prior research on vestibular perception has relied on passive motion, where a subject’s motion is controlled by the researcher. Findings from these studies may not directly apply to flight, however, because pilots actively control the aircraft. Active control leads to expectations of outcome (i.e., a pilot makes a control input and expects the aircraft to behave a certain way in response). Expected outcomes may alter how vestibular inputs are interpreted, particularly when such signals are ambiguous.
We will test this idea using NAMRU-Dayton’s in-house Disorientation Research Device (DRD), affectionately called the KrakenTM. Volunteer participants will experience different degrees of head and body motion on the roll axis, with movement controlled either by the experimenters or the subjects themselves. We expect that subjects’ perceptions of roll will be more accurate when they control the motion.
This study will help us better understand how pilots are likely to interpret vestibular sensations under conditions that more closely match the flight environment, helping to identify when the risk of SD is greatest.
The second study is a Joint Program Committee-5 (JPC-5) funded effort that will develop and test a training intervention to help pilots manage attention during periods of high workload. Our team of subject matter experts includes Drs. Jeffrey Phillips, Henry Williams, Frederick Patterson, Vincent Billock, Nick Fogt, and Lt. Cmdr. Micah Kinney.
Current SD training is mostly lecture-based and offers background on different types of illusions and conditions to be aware of in the flight environment. However, there is little opportunity for hands-on practice and the training does not provide many specific strategies for effectively avoiding SD. This project will develop a novel training program to bridge the gaps in current training.
Our study has two parts. First, we will use simulated SD scenarios to examine how pilots’ instrument scanning behaviors change in response to increasing workload, and how the risk of SD changes as a result. Second, we will use that information to develop and evaluate a training program to help pilots better manage their attention during periods of high workload and maintain spatial awareness. We hope that the new training will complement existing training to reduce the risk of SD moving forward.
Although spatial disorientation is a stubbornly persistent problem, NAMRU-Dayton’s continued research efforts position us to help better understand, predict, and ultimately mitigate this deadly threat.
| Date Taken: | 01.12.2021 |
| Date Posted: | 01.12.2021 14:57 |
| Story ID: | 386790 |
| Location: | DAYTON, OH, US |
| Web Views: | 154 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
This work, Reducing Risk through Research: NAMRU-Dayton Addresses Spatial Disorientation, by Megan Mudersbach, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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