Background and Objectives.

The study of the attentional function, a focus of interest in the neurosciences field, can be carried out through electroencephalographic quantification, a non-invasive technique that enables the evaluation of the brain activity. The objective of this work is to analyze the attention/concentration of staff of the Spanish Armed Forces in tactical simulations of handling military vehicles. For this purpose, variations in cortical bioelectric numerical complexity are analyzed when moving from resting states to simulation tasks, and with the difficulty of the task.

Material and methods.

Electroencephalographic signals were analyzed from a group of 36 volunteer subjects with the Mobility, an estimator of the average frequency of the signal that measures the standard deviation of the derivative of the signal in reference to the standard deviation of the amplitude. The data have been statistically studied by means of an exploratory survey, an analysis of variance of two factors and a hypothesis test.

Results.

An increase of the cortical average of Mobility is observed in each type of electroencephalogram as the task becomes more complex and requires more attention, and decreases as the activity ceases. Mobility shows a considerable increase in the occipital and part of the temporal areas during the simulations, which shows the activation of the signals corresponding to the primary visual area and the primary auditory cortex.

Conclusions.

Mobility detects changes in the activity of different cortical areas with the change in cognitive tasks. Thus, it can be considered a good indicator of brain activity.