Maritime Cognitive Workload Assessment

The human factor plays the key role for safety in many industrial and civil every-day operations in our technologized world. Human failure is more likely to cause accidents than technical failure, e.g. in the challenging job of tugboat captains. Here, cognitive workload is crucial, as its excess is a main cause of dangerous situations and accidents while being highly subject and situation dependent. However, reliable subjective ratings are hard to obtain while objective ratings of task difficulty remain a necessity for training as well as control, port and operation design - leading to a very high general interest in online cognitive workload indicators.