Share | Neurocognitive mechanisms linking temperature and humidity to miners' vigilance: an fNIRS study

Since the 21st century, the demand for coal has climbed, surface coal reserves have been depleted, and deep coal mining has increased. However, the temperature and humidity of the underground environment have also risen, and the hazards posed by high temperatures and humidity are one of the most significant challenges to coal mining safety. It has been found that when mine temperatures exceed 28°C, the physiological health of miners is severely compromised, with a significant increase in the prevalence of certain diseases. In addition, every 1°C rise in temperature leads to aminersproductivity is reduced by 6-8%. when the ambient temperature exceeds 35°C, theminersThe operating efficiency is only 20% of normal conditions. when theminersHeat-induced fatigue can affect their ability to react quickly when they need to react to special situations.

In coal mine safety research, human safety behavior has been the focus of research, and alertness is closely related to safety behavior. Decreased cognitive abilities such as alertness can lead to fatigue, decreased work performance, the emergence of risky behaviors, and the occurrence of accidents. It is important to enhance the understanding ofminersThe management of safe behavior requires the study of the effects of the external environment on theminersneurocognitive functioning to gain insight into theminersmechanisms underlying unsafe behaviors. In order to fully understand theminersintrinsic mechanisms of insecure behavior, we will use fNIRS to evaluate 100minersAlertness levels under different temperature and humidity conditions.

Subjects

Recruitment of 100 healthy menminers(26-42 years old) were divided into 4 groups, all subjects were right-handed and had normal vision.The experimental environment was in a temperature and humidity chamber in the Safety and Emergency Management Laboratory of Xi'an University of Science and Technology (Fig. 1), and the subjects wore fNIRS (Cortivision Photon Cap) devices.Ten light sources and nine detectors in the device were selected and placed in the subjects' prefrontal lobes (PFC), creating a total of 27 channels (Figure 2).

Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT)

The PVT is a simple test task that assesses and measures the time required for subjects to respond to irregular stimuli when presented (Figure 3). In this task, subjects are required to attend to each stimulus and respond in time to the target stimulus when it is presented, recording reaction time (RT) and error rate (ER).

The present study used E-prime 3.0 to present PVT stimuli. During the task, subjects were required to respond promptly to randomly presented red dots. Since the hemodynamic response does not return to baseline levels until approximately 10 seconds after reaching peak, at least 10 seconds or more were spaced between each trial (Fig. 4).