Abstract
A major design issue for military tactical displays concerns how to make as much information as possible available to the user “at a glance”, without compromising the ability of the user to decompose the display into meaningful units or chunks. The choice of symbology may therefore be a critical factor in managing the complexity of tactical displays. A new method for evaluating symbol sets was developed, using a flicker paradigm to simulate an operator's shifts of attention during interaction with the display and environment. Two symbol sets were compared: MIL-STD-2525B, and Symbicons, a hybrid symbology recently developed by the U.S. Navy. Overall, Symbicons outperformed the traditional MIL-STD-2525B symbols when participants were required to detect heading changes. Furthermore, only the Symbicons allowed participants to take advantage of advance knowledge of the platform type (sea or air) in which they could expect a heading change.
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