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Cognitive complexity is a term that appears frequently in air traffic control research literature, yet there is little principled investigation of the potential sources of cognitive complexity. Three distinctly different sources of cognitive complexity are proposed: environmental, organizational, and display. Two experiments were conducted to explore whether these proposed components of complexity could be effectively partitioned, measured, and compared. The findings demonstrate that sources of complexity can be decomposed and measured and furthermore, the use of color in displays, a display design intervention meant to reduce environmental complexity, can actually contribute to it. Language: en

Visual displays often employ the onset or flashing of an element to notify users of important events. Recent research findings and operational experiences in data-rich, event-driven domains, such as aviation, suggest that this design approach, which was supported by findings from early basic research on attention capture, is not always successful. The goal of this study was to examine how display context affects the effectiveness of abrupt onset signals. Participants in this study performed an externally paced visual task while trying to detect abrupt-onset stimuli, which were presented against 5 different display backgrounds and at 2 different eccentricities. The display background varied in terms of its dynamics and its color similarity to the target. Color similarity, the movement of background elements, and increasing target eccentricity resulted in reduced detection performance. The findings from this study help explain why pilots on modern flight decks sometimes miss changes in the status and behavi...

Ergavionic principles governing the design and operation of an airplane cockpit were discovered through simulator and flight experiments starting during World War II and continuing through the 1970s, but their systematic application has not happened. These principles deal with control location and operation, display integration and pictorial realism, and control/display direction-of-motion relationships. Systematic application of these principles would make the job of flying an airplane so much easier and safer that hundreds of lives would be saved every year, and in the decades to come, thousands of lives.

Modern aerial combat represents a highly complex task domain that imposes many significant challenges on aviators. In modern cockpits there are more sources of dynamic information than any single pilot has the ability to attend to, let alone comprehend, all at once. As technological developments lead to the deployment of new weapons systems, the future aerial battlefield will inevitably yield increased levels of complexity. A significant challenge for cockpit designers is to devise pilot-vehicle interfaces that take full advantage of the parallel information extraction capabilities of humans through the use of integrated multisensory displays. This article describes an approach to multisensory display development that uses human performance evaluations as a design tool, and concludes with a description of a multisensory crew station designed by an interdisciplinary team.

In a variety of domains, automation technology has evolved from passive tools to highly autonomous agents that can initiate actions independent of user input and without explicit operator consent. This evolution brings with it an increased need for effective human-automation communication and coordination to ensure that both agents stay informed about each others' goals, activities, and limitations. Yet, most modern systems are not equipped with the skills required to contribute effectively and in a timely manner to the exchange of information on commitments and actions. In particular, systems fail to provide external attentional guidance to their operators in the case of uncommanded changes and events, which can lead to automation surprises and, sometimes, incidents and accidents. To a large extent, these problems can be explained by designers' increasing reliance on automation feedback that requires focal visual attention. This article explores the potential of multisensory displays to better support at...