Abstract
Helicopter overland navigation is a cognitively complex task that requires continuous monitoring of system and environment parameters and many hours of training to master. This study investigated the effect of expertise on pilots’ gaze measurements, navigation accuracy, and subjective assessment of their navigation accuracy in overland navigation on easy and difficult routes. Twelve military officers who ranged in flight experience, as measured by total flight hours (TFH) completed a simulated overland task. They first completed map study of a route comprised of easy and difficult route sections, and then had to ‘fly’ this simulated route in a fixed-base helicopter simulator. They also completed pre-task estimations and post-task assessments of how hard it would be to navigate to each waypoint in the route. Their scan pattern was tracked via two eye tracking systems. The tracking systems captured both the participant’s out-the-window (OTW) and topographical map scan data. TFH was not associated with navigation accuracy and RMS (root mean square) error for either legs. For the easy routes, experts spent less time scanning out the window (ρ=-.61), had shorter OTW dwell (ρ=-.66), For the difficult routes, experts appeared to slow down their scan by spending as much time scanning out the window as novices, while also having fewer MAP fixations (ρ=-.65) and shorter OTW dwell (ρ=-.69). However, TFH was not significantly correlated with more accurate estimates of route difficulty. This study found that TFH did not predict navigation accuracy or subjective assessment but was correlated with some gaze parameters. It may be that TFH is too crude measure to use as a measure of expertise for task specific activities (e.g., overland navigation).
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