Repeated Induction of Inattentional Blindness in a Simulated Aviation Environment

Abstract

The study reported herein is a subset of a larger investigation on the role of automation in the context of the flight deck and used a fixed-based, human-in-the-loop simulator. This portion explored the relationship between automation and inattentional blindness (IB) occurrences in repeated induction using two types of runway incursions directly relevant to primary task performance. Sixty non-pilot participants performed the final five minutes of a landing scenario twice in one of three automation condition: full automation (FA), partial automation (PA), and no automation (NA). The first induction resulted in a 70% detection failure rate and the second induction resulted in a 50% detection failure rate. Detection improved in all conditions. IB group membership (IB vs. Detection) in the FA condition showed the most improvement and rated the Mental Demand and Effort subscales of the NASA-TLX significantly higher for Time 2 compared Time 1. Participants in the FA condition used the experience of IB exposure to reallocate attentional resources and improve task performance. These findings support the role of engagement in attention detriment and the consideration of attentional failure causation to select appropriate mitigation strategies.

An Attentive Blank Stare Under Simulator-induced Spatial Disorientation Events

“…The inability to notice changes in visual stimuli under specified conditions which is defined as change blindness (Simons & Levin, 1997), has been well-studied in the driving environment (Filtness & Beanland, 2018;Harms & Brookhuis, 2017;Martens, 2011;McCarley et al, 2004;Pammer et al, 2018;Topolšek et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2014) and in the aviation domain (Ahlstrom & Suss, 2015;Bruder & Hasse, 2020;Kennedy et al, 2017;McDermott Ealding & Stedmon, 2018;Mumaw et al, 2001;Zárate, 2012). Although there has been empirical work on mitigating change blindness (Tse, 2004), most studies support the assumption that change can be perceived if focused attention is allocated to the area of interest.…”

A tale of two theories: A meta-analysis of the attention set and load theories of inattentional blindness.

“…For example, via experimentally inducing IB with simultaneous brain measurement, neuroscientists have edged closer to isolating the neural signature associated with consciousness (for review, see Hutchinson, 2019). For the practitioner, IB offers a method for understanding the safety implications of real-world attentional lapses, such as in driving (Pammer & Blink, 2013; Pammer et al, 2018), aviation (Kennedy et al, 2017), construction (Liao & Chiang, 2016), surgery (Al-Moteri et al, 2018; Greig et al, 2014; Jones & Johnstone, 2017; Paparella, 2013), and police training (Simons & Schlosser, 2017). A better understanding of the rates of IB under such conditions helps inform training and intervention strategies for the potentially dire consequences of the lapses in attention that occur in the real-world, such as missing a pedestrian while driving.…”

Triggering Cockpit Alerts Using an Eye-Tracking-Based Measure of Monitoring Performance

“…In general, the approach to measure AD is very simple and susceptible to both false-positive and false-negative classifications of perception. The former could be explained by inattentional blindness (Kennedy et al, 2017) or working memory limitations (Cak et al, 2020) while the latter could be caused by nonfocal attention and perception with peripheral vision (Ramón Alamán et al, 2020). However, we think that this study is a step toward the implementation of more advanced adaptive systems for aircraft cockpits.…”