Improving flight simulation performance by using tDCS stimulation

The aim of this work is to demonstrate if the transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) should be useful to improve the performance of subjects while they are engaged in a flight simulation and, at the same time, in other secondary tasks. The evaluation of the flight performance is done by analyzing the pitch and bank angles respect to an ideal flight path that the subject learnt during the training sessions, while the tasks of alert and vigilance (TAV), the secondary tasks, are estimated by analyzing the reaction times and the error rates. Before the experiments the subjects receive a tDC stimulation, but they do not know about the possibility of a ‘fake’ stimulation (Sham condition), during which the tDCS device automatically turns off after few seconds. By comparing the performances of the two experimental conditions, with and without the tDCS, it is possible to find out if this kind of stimulation could help the enhancement of the performance before real operational missions. Also, the results are compared to the NASA-TLX scores for checking if the subjective workload evaluations have any relations with the performance levels of the two experimental conditions.