Safe and successful operation of the International Space Station robotic arm is a complex task requiring difficult bimanual hand coordination and spatial reasoning skills, adherence to operating procedures and rules, and systems knowledge. These task attributes are all potentially affected by chronic sleep loss and circadian misalignment. In a randomized, placebo-controlled, cross-over trial examining the impact of regularly timed low-dose caffeine (0.3 mg kg⁻¹ h⁻¹) and moderate illuminance blue-enriched white light (~90 lux, ~88 melEDI lux, 6300 K), 16 participants performed 3 types of realistic robotic arm tasks using a high-fidelity desktop simulator overnight. Our goal was to determine how these countermeasures, separately and combined, impacted telerobotic task performance and the ability to allocate attention to an unrelated secondary visual task. We found that all participants maintained a similar level of robotic task performance throughout the primary task but the application of caffeine separately and with blue-enriched light significantly decreased response time to a secondary visual task by −9% to −13%, whereas blue-enriched light alone changed average response times between −4% and +2%. We conclude that, for sleep-restricted individuals, caffeine improved their ability to divide their visual attention, while the effect of blue-enriched light alone was limited. Light and caffeine together was most effective. Use of these countermeasures should improve the margin of safety if astronauts perform familiar tasks under degraded conditions or novel tasks where task workload is increased.

国际空间站机械臂的安全、成功操作是一项复杂的任务，需要高难度的双手协调和空间推理技能、遵守操作程序和规则以及系统知识。这些任务属性都可能受到慢性睡眠不足和昼夜节律失调的影响。在一项随机、安慰剂对照、交叉试验中，研究了定期低剂量咖啡因（0.3 mg kg⁻¹ h）和中等照度的富蓝光白光（~90 lux、~88 melEDI lux、6300 K），16 名参与者执行了 3 种真实的机械臂任务通宵使用高保真桌面模拟器。我们的目标是确定这些对策（单独和组合）如何影响远程机器人的任务表现以及将注意力分配给不相关的次要视觉任务的能力。我们发现，所有参与者在整个主要任务中都保持了相似水平的机器人任务表现，但单独应用咖啡因和富含蓝色的光，显着降低了对次要视觉任务的响应时间 -9% 至 -13%，而蓝色 -单独的富集光将平均响应时间改变在-4%和+2%之间。我们的结论是，对于睡眠受限的人来说，咖啡因提高了他们分散视觉注意力的能力，而单独富含蓝色的光的效果是有限的。光和咖啡因一起使用最有效。如果宇航员在恶劣条件下执行熟悉的任务或任务工作量增加的新任务，使用这些对策应该可以提高安全系数。⁻¹