Effects of cockpit display of traffic information on visual attention and eye movements in the general aviation cockpit

A General Aviation pilot must perform primary flight tasks of aviate, navigate, and communicate while attending to information regarding collision avoidance. A cockpit display of traffic information (CDTI) has been previously proposed as a form of automation to assist in the latter task. The present study assessed the impact of a CDTI on the performance of a pilot's primary flight tasks. The Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MAT) was used as the primary task. The University students' multi-task performance, and visual sampling strategies with and without the CDTI were assessed. The addition of the CDTI task to the MAT task performance induced a scanning strategy change resulting in improved task performance. There appears to have been a shift from a data acquisition strategy to one emphasizing the frequent sampling of all task displays. However the engine thrust maintenance sub-task was negatively impacted by the addition of the CDTI task. It appears that the overall task demands of the MAT and CDTI together created interference with the memory demands of this sub-task leading to longer periods of time away from the optimal thrust. The effect of expertise on these abilities and strategies were investigated in a second experiment with University students and GA pilots. Expertise played a role in their strategies such that the students who had more MAT experience determined their attention strategy based on the ratio of intruders to total number of CDTI events. In contrast, the number of CDTI events appears to have driven the sampling strategies of the other participants (pilots and a second group of students) who had less experience with the MAT. The results of both experiments indicate the need for the training of an efficient information acquisition strategy particularly when a new display is added to a set of primary task displays. While the CDTI did not negatively affect overall primary task performance, it did alter the attentional strategies of the participants which was beneficial under the data-limited conditions of the first experiment but detrimental under the increased CDTI event rate of the second experiment.