Effects of Modern Primary Flight Display Clutter

Abstract

Many complex domains, including aviation, experience a continued increase in the amount of information that 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 to already busy displays has raised concerns about clutter. In this experiment, our goal was to investigate the performance and attentional costs associated with PFD clutter during a simulated flight and to determine to what 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 the three PFDs. Pilots were asked to detect various visual alerts and notifications that appeared on the PFD throughout the flight. Performance, eye tracking, and subjective measures were recorded. Clutter significantly 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 different clutter conditions. Spatial density and the number of transitions were found to be larger in the case of higher clutter, whereas the number of fixations on flight mode annunciators was higher in the low-clutter condition. Importantly, pilots rated clutter as being relatively low even in the high-clutter condition. In combination, these results suggest that pilots may benefit from real-time clutter detection and reduction techniques that are based on eye tracking metrics.

Clutter in Electronic Medical Records

“…This finding suggests that participants were distracted by unimportant data. The resulting large spread of fixations likely resulted in the increased response time and number of misses, consistent with results from previous studies (Moacdieh, Prinet, & Sarter, 2013;Moacdieh & Sarter, 2012). High clutter also affected directness measures.…”

Application of Eye Tracking Technology in Aviation, Maritime, and Construction Industries: A Systematic Review

“…After this, a more detailed analysis was performed in which a total of 2240 qualitative data items were extracted and synthesised to uncover industry distribution and demographics as well as the different applications of eye tracking studies in the maritime, aviation, and construction industries. [29] S1 Sweden [30] S2 Germany [31] S3 Norway [32] S4 Sweden [33] S5 Poland [34] S6 Norway [35] S7 UK [24] S8 Italy [36] S9 Canada [37] S10 Singapore [38] S11 Canada [39] S12 Norway [8] S13 Italy [40] S14 Norway [41] S15 Norway [42] S16 USA [43] S17 Norway [44] S18 Norway [45] S19 Australia [46] S20 Norway [47] S21 Sweden [48] S22 Singapore [27] S23 China [6] S24 Norway [49] S25 Turkey [50] S26 USA [51] S27 USA [52] S28 USA [53] S29 Sweden [54] S30 USA [55] S31 Germany [56] S32 France [57] S33 China [58] S34 USA [59] S35 Germany [60] S36 USA [61] S37 Germany [62] S38…”

“…In aviation, 36% of the studies used SA mainly for monitoring and error recognition applications. For example, Moacdieh et al [60] studied loss of SA to examine pilots' automation monitoring strategies and performance, as well as to understand human-automation interaction. In another study, Björklund et al [53] studied the effect of verbal callouts on SA, automation errors, and flight performance during simulated commercial flights.…”

What We Can Learn from Pilots for Handovers and (De)Skilling in Semi-Autonomous Driving

“…Even with that much of research progress, it is still a problem to achieve an efficient and safe integration of pilots and automation systems [12,14]. A lot of aviation accidents are the result of a variety of problems, usually caused by automation systems, pilots, or both [18].…”