Abstract
Process displays with the same perceptual resolution do the same job of conveying a process state to an operator. It is primarily the ability to convey relations and constraints that distinguishes good displays from poor ones. Object displays solve this problem by shifting monitoring to a situation unconstrainted by the system's architecture, allowing the integration of parameters as features of a geometric object. In doing so, however, object displays sacrifice the ability to provide a context giving meaning to these relations. The emergent features approach does not rely on any particular form of representation, but identifies the discriminations among process states which must be made to perform a task then searches for some representation which makes these discriminations perceptually salient. A series of experiments (Wickens 1986, Carswell – Wickens 1987, Sanderson et al. 1989) have compared a triangle object display with conventional bar chart displays with disparate results. The present experiment investigates the effects of noise on monitoring performance for these two display formats and finds that the relative advantages of the input-output-input barchart are eliminated under high noise conditions.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.