Theoretical Development of an Adaptive Secondary Task to Measure Pilot Workload for Flight Evaluations

Abstract

A series of research projects were reviewed that formulated the basis for the theoretical development and evaluation of an adaptive secondary task to measure pilot workload. The final flight project established the technical feasability of using a visual and auditory item-recognition (Sternberg) task as a measure of sensory-response loading and reserve information processing capacity while flying precision pitch maneuvers simulating terrain profiles. The discrete item secondary task presented letters of the alphabet at a rate driven by a scoring algorithm that adapted to the pitch error scores i.e., cross-coupled to the primary task. The preliminary results indicate an appreciable increase in reaction time and errors for the visual secondary task while flying the terrain avoidance primary task as compared to flying the same task under auditory task loading. Preliminary conclusions support the multiple resource model of information processing.