Evaluation of Control Stick/Cursor Relationships for Tracking Targets.

An experiment was conducted to measure operator performance on a target-tracking task with two control stick/tracking symbol relationships. Five performance measures were recorded for each subject in the experiment: (1) control reversals committed, (2) number of targets missed, (3)length of time on target, (4) acquisition or symbol slewing time, and (5) latency or response time. The control stick/tracking symbol relationships that produced consistently superior performance for varying conditions of target velocity and target number was that in which forward motion of the stick moved the symbol toward the top of the screen. Knowledge that more than one target would be in the field of view degraded tracking performance by producing more missed targets and longer acquisition times. Of the three subject groups tested-naive subjects, bombardier-navigators, and pilots-no one group was consistently superior in all performance measures recorded. There were, however, significant subject group differences for every one of the performance measures taken. (Author)