Learning Rate Represented by Differences in Neural Activations

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Ensuring proficiency for mission-critical skills will be a vital part of manned exploration of Mars. However, in spaceflight and without access to training equipment, these skills may degrade. VR systems with variable difficulty settings provide a promising alternative for real equipment, but such variable systems do not take account the ease of participant learning. In this paper, we explore the relation between VR task proficiency and electrophysiological data collected with an electroencephalogram (EEG), for three tasks related to rover control; rover navigation, obstacle detection, and robot arm manipulation. Our results showed that proficiency had an inverse correlation with gamma activation (30-160 Hz) and a direct correlation with activation in the alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (12-20 Hz) wavebands.</span>