An experiment is described that compares the use of redundant color coding for search and identification tasks under dual-task conditions; subjects made judgments about the state of components of a systems-management display while performing a compensatory tracking task.
The availability of redundant color coding on the secondary task resulted in a global improvement in tracking performance (primary task) that applied at all times, even when subjects were not attending to the systems-managment display. With regard to the response-time data for the color-coded display, redundant color coding improved search performance, but there was no benefit for performance on the identification task. The implications of the results for hypotheses relating to the serial or parallel processing of shape and color, and for cockpit applications generally, are discussed.
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