Which is more prominent for fighter pilots under different flight task difficulties: Visual alert or verbal alert?

To explore the behavioural and cognition patterns of fighter pilots under visual and verbal alert conditions, 20 right-handed subjects participated in the experiment after 200 h of flight task training, and ERP technology was used to conduct EEG experiments under four conditions: high time pressure visual alert, low time pressure visual alert, fast speech speed verbal alert, and slow speech speed verbal alert. The results indicated the following: 1) the highest accuracy rate and shortest reaction time could be achieved under the slow speech speed verbal alert condition, indicating that the slow speech speed alert performance was optimal. 2) Subjects in the verbal alert trial showed a “right hemisphere advantage”, and the brain function area was located in the right temporal lobes. The speech speed correlated negatively with the latency and amplitude of P80.3) Subjects in the visual alert trial showed a “left hemisphere advantage”, and the brain activity was located in the left parietal lobes. 4) The latency of P80 evoked by verbal alert was earlier than that of N140 evoked by visual alert, indicating that a verbal alert causes an earlier attention effect in pilots. Based on the eye movement experiment, the performance of visual and verbal dual-channel alert was significantly higher than that of visual alert. •Slow speech speed alert performance was optimal.•Verbal alert trial showed a “right hemisphere advantage”.•Visual alert trial showed a “left hemisphere advantage”.•Verbal alert causes an earlier attention effect in pilots.