The Influences of Display Highlighting and Size and Event Eccentricity for Aviation Surveillance

Abstract

The present experiments were designed to assess the influence of display size, display highlighting, and event eccentricity in a surveillance task. Pilots were asked to detect changes in the movement or altitude of weather systems or traffic aircraft, which were represented in integrated hazard displays. Experiment 1 examined change detection as a function of the distance of the event from ownship and the presence of the event in a highlighted or lowlighted hazard domain. Analyses revealed that change detection was superior for events that were in the highlighted display database and that performance was slightly degraded for more eccentric events. Experiments 2 and 3 assessed the role of display size and event eccentricity. Analyses showed that change detection was unaffected by the size of the display, though performance was again degraded for changes located near the perimeter of the display. Findings imply that surveillance of the display perimeters will depreciate and additional methods should be used to ensure that attention is sufficiently directed to these areas.

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