Study on the Operator's Mental Activity under Unexpected Control System's Condition

It is difficult for human operator to control complex and large system by hand, because the delay of system response could be long. Although some previous studies characterized the progress in the manual control, the relation between the operator's progress and mental activity was not clear. In this study, we tried to make the relation clear and conducted a simulation experiment to compare the subject's performances and background electroencephalograms (EEGs). The EEGs were measured based on international 10–20 method while the subject controlled a target on the simulator. The subjects were 12 male students ranging from 19 to 23 years old. As the results, we found that the amplitude of theta waves at frontal region was getting higher when the subjects were under the unexpected condition.