Mental workload assessment by monitoring brain, heart, and eye with six biomedical modalities during six cognitive tasks.

Introduction: The efficiency and safety of complex high precision human-machine systems such as in aerospace and robotic surgery are closely related to the cognitive readiness, ability to manage workload, and situational awareness of their operators. Accurate assessment of mental workload could help in preventing operator error and allow for pertinent intervention by predicting performance declines that can arise from either work overload or under stimulation. Neuroergonomic approaches based on measures of human body and brain activity collectively can provide sensitive and reliable assessment of human mental workload in complex training and work environments. Methods: In this study, we developed a new six-cognitive-domain task protocol, coupling it with six biomedical monitoring modalities to concurrently capture performance and cognitive workload correlates across a longitudinal multi-day investigation. Utilizing two distinct modalities for each aspect of cardiac activity (ECG and PPG), ocular activity (EOG and eye-tracking), and brain activity (EEG and fNIRS), 23 participants engaged in four sessions over 4 weeks, performing tasks associated with working memory, vigilance, risk assessment, shifting attention, situation awareness, and inhibitory control. Results: The results revealed varying levels of sensitivity to workload within each modality. While certain measures exhibited consistency across tasks, neuroimaging modalities, in particular, unveiled meaningful differences between task conditions and cognitive domains. Discussion: This is the first comprehensive comparison of these six brain-body measures across multiple days and cognitive domains. The findings underscore the potential of wearable brain and body sensing methods for evaluating mental workload. Such comprehensive neuroergonomic assessment can inform development of next generation neuroadaptive interfaces and training approaches for more efficient human-machine interaction and operator skill acquisition.

Disentangling language-related item biases in stress research with people of Turkish origin in Germany: An application of the CCT procedure.

Psychological stress experiences play a major role in the development of ethnic health disparities. Investigating such relationships often requires the use of questionnaires in different languages, however, this involves the risk of biased measurements. Such biases may be even more likely to occur the closer the construct being measured is to cultural experiences. We adapted the culture, comprehension, and translation bias (CCT) procedure (Bader et al., 2021) to test three language-related item biases in the measurement of stress experience among people of Turkish origin in Germany (i.e., language choice, comprehension, and translation bias) in the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and the Multidimensional Acculturative Stress Inventory (MASI). One thousand three hundred four adult persons of Turkish origin living in Germany participated in an online survey with a quasi-experimental design: participants either chose the German version, were assigned the German version, or were assigned the Turkish version of the study questionnaire. Participants completed the 10-item PSS, 25-item MASI, and other measures, and provided sociodemographic data. The adapted CCT procedure revealed none of the language-related biases for the PSS, whereas for the MASI a language choice bias could be demonstrated for one item, a comprehension bias for one item, and a translation bias for five items. The results suggest that language-related item biases are trait-specific and that the CCT procedure is suitable for testing other item biases beyond those tested by Bader et al. Testing such item biases may improve the study of stress experiences in the context of ethnic health disparities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The German Version of the Multidimensional Acculturative Stress Inventory (MASI) for Turkish-Origin Immigrants -Measurement Invariance of Filter Questions and Validation.

The Multidimensional Acculturative Stress Inventory (MASI) is an established measure of acculturative stress for people of Mexican origin living in the United States that has been associated with mental health outcomes in this population. We translated the MASI into German and adapted it for use with Turkish-origin immigrants in Germany. The MASI includes filter questions asking if a potentially stressful event had actually occurred before reporting the stress appraisal of these situations. Measurement invariance testing has become a standard practice to evaluate questionnaire translations, however, measurement invariance of filter questions has been scarcely studied. In Study I, we evaluated measurement invariance of the filter questions between a German-based Turkish sample (N = 233) and the Mexican-origin sample from the original study (N = 174) and could show partial strong factorial invariance for three of the four factors. In Study II, a validation study, relations between the German MASI scores and measures of acculturation and stress indicated discriminant validity. This study contributes to research on measurement invariance of filter questions, thereby providing a measure of acculturative stress that can be used in future research to understand the etiology of health disparities in Turkish-origin immigrants in Germany.

Short Versus Long Scales in Clinical Assessment: Exploring the Trade-Off Between Resources Saved and Psychometric Quality Lost Using Two Measures of Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms.

Short measures of psychological constructs are routinely used to save assessment time and cost. The downside is a trade-off between resource savings and psychometric quality. When evaluating tests, a pragmatic strategy is frequently applied that neglects the assessment objective, which may result in unfair rejection or unmindfully acceptance of short scales. Our main aim is to demonstrate the consequences of applying a pragmatic test evaluation strategy. We used two tests that measure the same construct-obsessive-compulsive symptomatology-but differ considerably in test length (1:3) and evaluated the measures by taking the assessment objective into account. The two scale scores showed distinct profiles of psychometric qualities. Whereas routinely evaluated reliability, factorial validity, and convergent/discriminant validity did not differ, rendering both tests useful for research purposes, substantial differences were found for qualities that are rarely focused on-measurement precision and diagnostic validity-which are highly relevant for accurate decisions in clinical practice.

Monte Carlo simulations of a nozzle for the treatment of ocular tumours with high-energy proton beams.

By the end of 2002, 33 398 patients worldwide had been treated with proton radiotherapy, 10 829 for eye diseases. The dose prediction algorithms used today for ocular proton therapy treatment planning rely on parameterizations of measured proton dose distributions, i.e., broad-beam and pencil-beam techniques, whose predictive capabilities are inherently limited by severe approximations and simplifications in modelling the radiation transport physics. In contrast, the Monte Carlo radiation transport technique can, in principle, provide accurate predictions of the proton treatment beams by taking into account all the physical processes involved, including coulombic energy loss, energy straggling, multiple Coulomb scattering, elastic and nonelastic nuclear interactions, and the transport of secondary particles. It has not been shown, however, whether it is possible to commission a proton treatment planning system by using data exclusively from Monte Carlo simulations of the treatment apparatus and a phantom. In this work, we made benchmark comparisons between Monte Carlo predictions and measurements of an ocular proton treatment beamline. The maximum differences between absorbed dose profiles from simulations and measurements were 6% and 0.6 mm, while typical differences were less than 2% and 0.2 mm. The computation time for the entire virtual commissioning process is less than one day. The study revealed that, after a significant development effort, a Monte Carlo model of a proton therapy apparatus is sufficiently accurate and fast for commissioning a treatment planning system.