• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.83-90
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• 2011

It is well known that urgency resulted from time stress can be a great cause to industrial accidents. Therefore, time stress has been studied in the aspect of macroscopic view, namely industrial safety management, but has not been studied in microscopic view such as psychophysiological approach. Among diverse psychophysiological indices, Electroencephalogram(EEG) would be on of the most objective psychophysiological research technique on human errors though few research has been taken yet. This study aimed to get characteristics of human error while committing a simple arithmetic addition task by utilizing the power spectrum technique of EEG data. Each experiment was composed of 2 tasks under different condition - with and without time stress. As subjects, 5 young undergraduate students in their early twenties participated in this study. The results advocated a well-known fact that time stress downgrades the performance of human workers. However, correct answer rate and response time were not significantly influenced by time stress factor which might be explained by the constructural factor adopted in the present study. As in the previous studies, among various EEG-related measures, relative band power ratios of ${\alpha}$ and ${\beta}$ waves to sum of ${\alpha}$,${\beta}$,${\theta}$ wave powers, namely $P_{{\alpha}/({\alpha}+{\beta}+{\theta})}$ and $P_{{\beta}/({\alpha}+{\beta}+{\theta})}$ seemed to be the most effective measures to grasp variation of brain activities in time-stressed situation so that discussions were expanded about their variations.