Heart Rate as a Marker of Mental Workload in Virtual Reality Flight Tasks
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_usr_local_eecsis_uploads_koerner-jkoerner-sm-eecs-2026-thesis.pdf
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Author(s)
Koerner, Jamie
Advisor(s)
Heldt, Thomas
Sze, Vivienne
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Heart rate (HR) has been shown to correlate with cognitive metrics, particularly mental workload, in safety-critical environments. In real aircraft, there is broad consensus that HR is positively correlated with workload, making it a potential surrogate for tracking. With virtual reality (VR) increasingly used for training and education, this thesis examines whether the same relationship holds in VR. To address this, participants (n = 20) with varying flight experience performed repeated instrument landing system (ILS) approaches in a VR simulator while electrocardiography (ECG) and photoplethysmography (PPG) were recorded alongside workload ratings and performance measures. Mean HR increased by 2% (p < 0.05) with task difficulty, decreased by 5% (p < 0.01) across repeated runs, and rose by 3% (p < 0.01) shortly before touchdown relative to the start of the approach. HR trends tracked subjective workload and provided information beyond performance alone. Patterns in VR were consistent with those reported in real aircraft, and PPG-derived HR closely matched ECG-derived HR, supporting PPG as a practical, unobtrusive alternative for VR-based monitoring. These findings show that HR in VR is informative about mental workload, capturing difficulty-, practice-, and phase-related effects. This supports VR as both a testbed for studying workload and a platform for adaptive training that can use HR as a meaningful input to adjust difficulty, sustain engagement, and enhance learning efficiency.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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