Effects of Modern Primary Flight Display Clutter: Evidence from Performance and Eye Tracking Data

摘要

Many complex domains, including aviation, experience a continued increase in the amount of informationthat is needed and available to operators. One example of this trend is modern primary flight displays(PFD), some of which now include weather, terrain, and navigation data. The addition of information toalready busy displays has raised concerns about clutter. In this experiment, our goal was to investigate theperformance and attentional costs associated with PFD clutter during a simulated flight and to determine towhat extent pilots are aware of clutter and its effects. Low-, medium-, and high-clutter PFDs were created,and pilots flew a simulated flight scenario containing periods of high and low workload using one of thethree PFDs. Pilots were asked to detect various visual alerts and notifications that appeared on the PFDthroughout the flight. Performance, eye tracking, and subjective measures were recorded. Cluttersignificantly increased the response time to alerts, and high workload resulted in more alerts being missed.The eye tracking data provided insight into pilots’ monitoring strategies and efficiency in the differentclutter conditions. Spatial density and the number of transitions were found to be larger in the case ofhigher clutter, whereas the number of fixations on flight mode annunciators was higher in the low-cluttercondition. Importantly, pilots rated clutter as being relatively low even in the high-clutter condition. Incombination, these results suggest that pilots may benefit from real-time clutter detection and reductiontechniques that are based on eye tracking metrics.