THE NASA PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT WORKSTATION - COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE DURING HEAD-DOWN BED REST

The NASA Performance Assessment Workstation was used to assess cogniti ve performance changes in eight males subjected to seventeen days of 6 0 head-down bed rest. PAWS uses six performance tasks to assess direct ed and divided attention, spatial, mathematical, and memory skills, an d tracking ability. Subjective scales assess overall fatigue and mood state. Subjects completed training trials, practice trials, bed rest t rials, and recovery trials. The last eight practice trials and all bed rest trials were performed with subjects lying face-down on a gurney. In general there was no apparent cumulative effect of bed rest. Follo wing a short period of performance stabilization, a slight but steady trend of performance improvement was observed across all trials. For m ost tasks, this trend of performance improvement was enhanced during r ecovery. No statistically significant differences in performance were observed when comparing bed rest with the control period. Additionally , fatigue scores showed little change across all periods. (C) 1998 Els evier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.