How the workload impacts on cognitive cooperation: A pilot study.

Cooperation degradation can be seen as one of the main causes of human errors. Poor cooperation could arise from aberrant mental processes, such as mental overload, that negatively affect the user's performance. Using different levels of difficulty in a cooperative task, we combined behavioural, subjective and neurophysiological data with the aim to i) quantify the mental workload under which the crew was operating, ii) evaluate the degree of their cooperation, and iii) assess the impact of the workload demands on the cooperation levels. The combination of such data showed that high workload demand impacted significantly on the performance, workload perception, and degree of cooperation.