Field of View Issues on the Flight Deck

Abstract

Twenty-eight empirical studies provided data for four meta-analyses on visual detection and discrimination inflight-decktypical tasks, at varying degrees of eccentricity relative to a central point of interest. The data revealed a general trend for poorer performance at increasing eccentricity, and greater degradation when eye movements were prevented. The data failed to reveal a systematic discontinuity of performance degradation beyond 15°, which defines the typical “primary field of view” in the cockpit, but they reveal a 14% miss rate and 21% discrimination error rate at that location. The results also point to the profound influence of moderator variables of expectancy and salience on eccentric visual performance.

Information Access Effort: The Role of Head Movements for Information Presented at Increasing Eccentricity on Flat Panel and Head-Mounted Displays

“…Also, the increase in head movements at the wider visual angle was much greater for the vertical than for the lateral displacement. Both of these head movement increases in the vertical axis may be associated with visual acuity declining more rapidly in the vertical direction (Abrams et al, 2012; Wickens et al, 2016). Our participants here, as elsewhere, appear to have entirely compensated for this diminished resolution along the vertical axis by increasing their frequency of head rotations to bring information into foveal vision.…”

“…In Experiment 3, we evaluated increasing VAS instead, in the vertical direction for the same two tasks using an AR-HMD. This axis direction contrast was examined because Wickens and colleagues (2005) had found a greater cost for vertical displacement than lateral, and because of differences in visual resolution across the two axes (Abrams et al, 2012; Wickens et al, 2016).…”