An Attentive Blank Stare Under Simulator-induced Spatial Disorientation Events

Abstract

Objective This study investigated the effect of the spatial disorientation (SD) events on an attentive blank stare in the cockpit scene and demonstrated how much the flight task and visual delayed discrimination task were competing for the pilots’ attention. Background SD in flight is the leading cause of human error-related aircraft accidents in the military, general and commercial aviation, and has been an unsolved problem since the inception of flight. In-flight safety research, visually scanning cockpit instruments, and detecting changes are critical countermeasures against SD. Method Thirty male military pilots were performing a dual task involving piloting a flight simulator and visual change detection, while eye movements were obtained using an eye tracker. Results Pilots made more flight errors and spent less time gazing at the area of change in SD-conflict than in non-conflict flights. The vestibular origin SD-conflict led not only to deteriorated piloting and visual scanning but also to problems coordinating overt and covert attention, resulting in lower noticeability of visual changes despite gazing at them. Conclusion Our study shows that looking at a given area in space is not a sufficient condition for effective covert attention allocation and the correct response to a visual stimulus. It seems to be important to make pilots aware of this during SD training. Application To reduce change blindness, some strategies, such as reducing the number of secondary tasks is extremely valuable. Particular efforts should also be focused on improving the design of the aircraft cockpit by increasing the conspicuousness of critical information.

How Does Mental Distraction Induced by an Additional Task Affect the Severity of Simulator Sickness Symptoms in Pilots: A Spatial Disorientation Simulator Study

“…To address the above-mentioned research issue, we compared the results of our previous studies [19,58], including fl ight scenarios with additional visual or auditory task-induced cognitive load, with the study having the same fl ight scenarios [1], in which the pilot did not perform an additional task (control study). The additional cognitive load was imposed by one of three tasks.…”

“…The additional cognitive load was imposed by one of three tasks. The fi rst task was a change detection fl icker task (CDFT) [19] based on a measurement of a subject's response to visual stimuli. The second task was an auditory N-back task (NBT) involving sound stimuli (the sequential letter memory task), and the third concerns a duration-discrimination task (DDT) in which the subjects had to respond to the sound stimuli (tones) [58].…”

“…We did this research as part of other studies [1,19,58] that investigated the overall eff ects of SD events on fl ight performance and instrument scanning [1], an attentive blank stare [19], and the cognitive performance [58] in military pilots while they were piloting a fl ight simulator.…”

“…The between-group study design consisted of four experiments (which we have previously conducted [1,19,58]) in which a diff erent group of participants performed fl ying tasks in an SD simulator. Experiment 1 [1] was set in the presented study as a control (baseline) test that consisted of carrying out manoeuvres with the maintenance of fl ight parameters according to the fl ying instructions given in defi ned, standard fl ight scenarios.…”

“…To eff ectively trigger SD events, NATO's SD Working Group recommends multi-task and highworkload fl ight simulations with scenarios such as cockpit distraction [5]. This type of approach has been applied in our previous studies [1,19,58], in which pilots experienced additional cognitive load (induced by visual or sound stimuli) when fl ying an aircraft in the Gyro-IPT SD simulator. Given that our previous studies did not identify a possible eff ect of additional stimuli on the severity of simulator sickness symptoms (we only tested the infl uence of exposition in the simulator on simulator sickness incidence to ensure that participants did not feel sick during and after the experiment), whether the additional tasks performed by the pilots could contribute to reducing or increasing the severity of sickness symptoms is of interest.…”