Effects of critical information saliency on task performance: Application of ecological information augmentation in a cockpit display of traffic information

This thesis reports the examination, implementation, and evaluation of a case study in Ecological Information Augmentation (EIA). EIA is a heuristic encompassing the method and practice of enhancing the perceptual/cognitive salience of task-critical display information. Three experiments were conducted in which the EIA heuristic was used to identify task-specific, pertinent information in a visual display, augment that information, and compare operator performance before augmentation with performance after augmentation. Specifically a self-navigation task was given to commercial airline pilots. This task involved flying through simulated traffic conflict situations in a flight simulator equipped with two variants of a cockpit display of traffic information (CDTI). One variant contained enhanced time-to-contact information, the other did not. The control variant merely presented simple map views of simulated air traffic surrounding the pilot's own aircraft. The experimental variant was identical except for displaying aircraft traffic symbols color-coded according to their estimated time-to-contact with the pilot's own ship. Experiment One was a between-Ss study designed to facilitate familiarity with the experimental equipment and allow refinement of the research design and data analysis techniques. Multiple measures of aircraft proximity and response time were compared across the two display conditions. Two dependent measures were developed specifically for these studies. Results of Experiment One indicated trends toward superior performance with the augmented CDTL Experiment Two incorporated several research design refinements motivated by the need for increased experimental power. Results of Experiment Two indicated statistically significant superiority for the augmented CDTI in both speed and accuracy based measures. Experiment Three replicated Experiment Two but with non-pilots. This was to check the generalizability of results to non-expert population. Results of Experiment Three indicated that information augmentation had no discernable effect as far as non-expert operators were concerned. Taken together these three experiments provided clear support for the effectiveness of EIA as a human factors heuristic in the design of visual information displays meant for use by expert operators.