Is Dual-Task Performance Necessarily Impaired in Space?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent single-subject experiments in space have reported impaired dual-task performance that could result from either a direct effect of microgravity on the central nervous system or from the multistressor environment. We sought to distinguish between these hypotheses using 6 astronauts in the 16-day NASA Neurolab mission, testing them at intervals with a dual task consisting of primary pursuit tracking without vision of the hand and secondary reaction time (RT). The participants were highly trained, instructed to maintain a fixed attention strategy, and restrained in the apparatus. The results showed that absolute and variable tracking error, as well as correct RT and the standard deviation of RT, were unimpaired. However, RT errors became more variable, an effect attributed to a decrease in strategic control. We conclude that the impairments observed in previous dual-task space experiments can be attributed to stressors rather than to microgravity and that performance deficits are probably not a necessary concomitant of space flight if attention is paid to task design and astronaut training.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".