School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China; Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Biomedical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China.
China CDC Key Laboratory of Radiological Protection and Nuclear Emergency, National Institute for Radiological Protection, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 100088, China.
Behav Brain Res. 2023 Feb 13;438:114182. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2022.114182. Epub 2022 Oct 26.
Human brains rely on oscillatory coupling mechanisms for regulating access to prefrontal cognitive resources, dynamically communicating between the frontal and remote cortex. We worry that communications across cortical regions will be impeded when humans in extreme space environments travel with mental load work, affecting the successful completion of missions. Here, we monitored crews of workers performing a Go/Nogo task in space travel, accompanied by acquisitions of electroencephalography (EEG) signals. These data demonstrated that when the target stimulus suddenly changed to the non-target stimulus, an instantaneous communication mechanism between the frontal and occipital cortex was established by theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling (PAC). However, this frontal-occipital communication was impeded because of the mental workload of space travel. 86 healthy volunteers who participated in the ground imitation further indicated that mental workload caused decoupled theta-gamma PAC during the Go/Nogo task, impeding frontal-occipital communications and behavioral performance. We also found that the degree of theta-gamma PAC coupling in space was significantly lower than on the ground, indicating that mental workload and other hazards worsen the impeded frontal-occipital communications of humans. These results could guide countermeasures for the inadaptability of humans working in spaceflight.
人类大脑依赖于振荡耦合机制来调节前额认知资源的访问，在额叶和远程皮质之间动态地进行通信。我们担心当人类在极端太空环境中进行有心理负荷的工作时，跨皮质区域的通信将受到阻碍，从而影响任务的成功完成。在这里，我们监测了在太空旅行中执行 Go/Nogo 任务的工作人员，同时采集了脑电图（EEG）信号。这些数据表明，当目标刺激突然变为非目标刺激时，theta-gamma 相位-振幅耦合（PAC）在额叶和枕叶皮质之间建立了瞬时通信机制。然而，由于太空旅行的心理工作量，这种额叶-枕叶的通信受到了阻碍。86 名健康志愿者参与了地面模拟实验，进一步表明在 Go/Nogo 任务中，心理工作量导致 theta-gamma PAC 解耦，阻碍了额叶-枕叶的通信和行为表现。我们还发现，太空环境中的 theta-gamma PAC 耦合程度明显低于地面，表明心理工作量和其他危害会加剧人类额叶-枕叶通信的受阻。这些结果可以为指导应对太空作业人员的不适应提供参考。
