UC San Diego

Neuroergonomics is a nascent field of study that seeks to apply knowledge and tools from neuroscience to better optimize the tracking and regulation of human factors in the everyday and working environments. Neuroergonomics emphasizes the use of naturalistic and ecologically relevant experimental tasks to make important advancements from sterile experimental settings to useful real-world scenarios. This dissertation offers two naturalistic and ecologically relevant experimental tasks, as well as innovative neuroimaging and statistical analysis techniques, to contribute to, and demonstrate the feasibility of, the growing field of neuroergonomics. For the first experimental task, we designed a three-dimensional and first-person fMRI task during which human subjects maneuvered a simulated airplane in pursuit of a target airplane along constantly changing headings. The second experiment involves recording mobile EEG from human subjects performing a working memory adaptation of the everyday task of dart throwing. We find encouraging neuroimaging results from both experiments and relate them to important cognitive neuroscience theories on human action and working memory. In so doing, we demonstrate the feasibility of neuroergonomics and how knowledge and tools from neuroscience can indeed help us understand the brain at work and in everyday life.