'Two Planets, One Future'
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Human Factors

Psychological Studies on Expedition One, Utah, USA.

During Expedition One (ExOne) in February-March 2003 in Utah, USA, a range of psychological measures, informal observation, crew discussion and other means were used to collect information about crew psychological issues. The overall goal of the psychological studies was to gain insight into crew individual and group issues that may be relevant to a human mission to Mars or other prolonged human spaceflight. Another goal was to gather information relevant to improved functioning for future Mars simulation crews. The psychological data was collected by several crewmembers including , psychologist from France, Dr Nishi Rawat, medical resident, at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore USA, MSA President and myself. Several research teams were represented from Australia, USA and Canada. Some details are reported below while the post ExOne psychology report is available here.

Social Psychological Measures
All crew members completed a questionnaire entitled "Personal and Group Functioning Survey". This instrument was developed by social psychologists and at the School of Psychology, Australian National University. It is based on an extensive literature and research on issues of group identity and goal alignment conducted by the Social Psychology Research Unit at ANU. It aims to help determine the extent to which crew members on ExOne identified with ExOne overall as well as with it's subgroups such as Field Science and Mission Systems. In turn it aims to measure the degree to which crewmembers aligned their personal goals with the overall ExOne group and it's subgroups.

Neurocognitive Measures
All crewmembers also completed a brief, computerised measure of cognitive performance called CogState. This measure was developed by a team of neuropsychology researchers in Melbourne including Assoc. Prof. Paul Maruff. The team has developed highly sensitive measures of changes in neurocognitive status, currently being applied to medical and sports medicine settings but also potentially applicable to human space missions. Data from ExOne is being analysed as a separate neuropsychological study as well being incorporated into the social psychology study.

Personality Measures
To supplement measures of group and individual function crewmembers also completed a personality battery currently used by NASA to help select astronauts. of University of Texas Medical Branch provided the personality measures and is currently collaborating on data analysis and interpretation.

Results
While results are not yet to hand, informal observation suggested that group identification was indeed a significant factor in both individual and group performance in this simulated Mars base environment. Observation suggested that the extensive planning and group communication prior to ExOne resulted in an unusual level of shared group identity in crewmembers with resulting high levels of achievement of both group and individual goals. Observation during neurocognitive measures suggested that group identification may have impacted cognitive performance but that other factors such as amount of sleep and workload were also significant. Personality of individual crewmembers was observed to markedly impact both group and individual function. In general crewmembers were observed to show a high level of cooperative behaviour in difficult conditions but on occasions friction related to personality differences was observed to disrupt both group cohesion and individual performance.


Background

“Human factors” has been an important consideration in US, Russian and other space programmes to date. Particular issues have included the impact of microgravity on human biological systems, design of living quarters, and group interaction in confined spaces. These issues are even more important when considering the long duration space flight, communication lags and hostile environment to be faced by explorers on Mars.

A number of areas of human factors research are currently under consideration by MSA. These include testing habitat design, crew interaction and crew selection on the proposed Mars-OZ site at Arkaroola. Also under consideration are techniques for measuring human performance variables such as attention, fatigue and ‘situation awareness’. Some proposed research focuses on human-machine interaction.


Links

Bill Clancey (NASA Ames), analogue research publications