Operator workload responses to a VR-based cognitive and motor task before and after a 30-day simulated ICE mission: A multimodal ergonomic assessment

In isolated, confined and extreme (ICE) environments, prolonged sensory monotony, limited space and sustained task demands may affect operators’ cognitive performance and workload state, with potential consequences for mission safety and system reliability. This small-sample exploratory longitudinal repeated-measures study involved seven male participants in a 30-day simulated ICE mission and examined operator responses to a virtual reality (VR) cognitive and motor task at the pre-isolation and post-isolation measurement windows. The experimental factors were the pre-isolation and post-isolation measurement windows and the pre-VR and post-VR task phases. At each window, participants completed Stroop, Vigilance and reversed digit memory tasks, while cognitive task performance, subjective scales, VR movement behavior, electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals were recorded. After Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate (BH-FDR) correction, the clearest changes occurred in the Stroop task. Compared with the pre-isolation measurement window, the post-isolation window showed a higher Stroop completion count, a lower average reaction time and lower EEG Delta-band wavelet amplitude in the left occipital lobe, right occipital lobe, left motor cortex and left prefrontal cortex. In the pre-VR versus post-VR comparison, Stroop completion count increased and average reaction time decreased after VR. Other results from EEG effective connectivity, fNIRS, subjective scales, VR behavior and cross-modal associations did not show similarly stable corrected differences. The findings indicate that cognitive performance and neurophysiological measures describe different aspects of operator-state changes during confined, high-demand operations and may inform operator workload assessment, multimodal state monitoring and VR task design in ICE and similar operational environments.