ReaLAPSE: Neural makers of lapsing attention during sustained real-world task performance

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Too often still, people lose their lives or livelihoods in tragic accidents that have their root causes in lapses of attention. Leveraging the technological advances available to us nowadays, we should be able to develop assistance systems that prevent these accidents. One pioneering way forward is to closely monitor changes in physiological signals, such as heart rate gaze, and brain activity, which provide an objective readout of current attention levels. Sudden changes in these readings could be used to issue warnings about imminent lapses. However, we still have a long way to go to understand which of these signals work reliably for most users, and across a range of everyday situations. To this end, I propose a project that will look into a promising and novel combination of different signals across a large group of adult volunteers, recruited from all trades of life. In a series of three studies, I will search for the most useful physiological markers in a lab-based experiment first, with human participants performing a demanding task for 1-2 hours. A second study will then test whether promising markers can also be measured and applied in a real-world situation. Finally, the question of whether lapses can be prevented in the short term by giving audio warnings will be addressed in a third study. This project will also involve a collaboration with an industry partner, FC Laboratories, Ltd. Their prototype wearable brain activity monitor will be added as a measurement modality to all experiments.