The Effect of Lighting on Cognitive Performance of Rapid Shift Seafarers

The fatigue and health issues among shift workers merit significant attention. Dynamic lighting that imitates daylight is considered a solution to maintain the rhythm and reduce fatigue of shift workers, but it is necessary to ensure that a good cognitive performance on duty because it is closely related to production safety and preventing accidents. The work environment and shift system are considered the two most critical influenced factors. Among them, the lighting condition can significantly affect the performance of human beings through visual and non-visual effects, it is also worth noting that their work performance is very different throughout the day. Especially for shift workers, it is very important to set different lighting conditions at different shift periods. In this study, we conducted a comparative analysis of the cognitive performance of shift workers across different shifts under two distinct lighting conditions. All 16 subjects participated in the shift experiment under dynamic light and static light. We utilized the Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT), 2-back and D2 tasks to assess sustained attention, short-term memory and concentration, respectively. Perform at least 20 training sessions on the task to eliminate practice effects. The findings indicated that bright nighttime lighting was found to significantly enhance the accuracy of short-term memory tasks and decrease the omissions in concentration tasks, but the performance of sustained attention task is unaffected.