Design, Development, and Validation of a Military Orientated Re-configurable Cognitive Task Battery

The United Kingdom’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) has developed an innovative military cognitive task battery tool titled: Interactive Measures of Performance and Assessment of Cognitive Tasks (IMPACT). The purpose of the tool is to support the objective assessment of cognitive task performance and task demand across a range of military system types, use cases and experimental settings. IMPACT consists of six, reconfigurable, generic military tasks, and an intuitive user interface for the experimenter to configure the tool and collect data. Initial validation of the IMPACT tool has been undertaken and a number of early adopters have used the tool to support trials, system development and experimentation. The validation results show that the six individual IMPACT tasks broadly stimulate the associated cognitive attributes; as mapped and originally conceived during the design and development of the tool; as measured by subjective assessment techniques, psychophysiological monitoring, and performance measures. IMPACT continues to be refined in response to feedback from the validation exercise and early adopters of the tool.