DMG-GCN: A Dynamic Microstate-Guided Graph Convolutional Network for EEG Cognitive Workload Decoding in Air Traffic Control

Complex inter-subject variability induces severe distribution shifts in the physiological features of electroencephalography (EEG) for air traffic controllers (ATCOs). These inter-subject shifts limit the generalization and interpretability of passive brain–computer interfaces (pBCIs) during cognitive workload decoding. To address this, a Dynamic Microstate-Guided Graph Convolutional Network (DMG-GCN) is proposed for robust cross-subject workload recognition. This approach utilizes a Dynamic Selective Kernel Temporal Convolutional Block (DSK-TCB) to adaptively extract multi-scale temporal–spectral dynamics, while concurrently constructing a time-evolving adjacency matrix via a Microstate-Guided Dynamic Graph Block (MG-DGB) to disentangle topological sub-networks. A spatiotemporal graph convolution module then aggregates these representations, and a temporal self-attention mechanism focuses on task-critical transition moments. Extensive experiments on simulated multi-level air traffic control tasks demonstrate that the proposed model achieves an overall average accuracy of 80.30% and an average F1-score of 78.63% in cross-subject evaluations, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, an exploratory interpretability analysis suggests that the extracted topological sub-networks exhibit spatial patterns consistent with specific brain network reorganizations, which encompass the transition from global distributed monitoring to temporal multimodal integration and parietal–occipital parallel processing during workload regulation. The framework provides a robust and analytically transparent pBCI solution for adaptive automation in modern aviation.