Attentional costs and failures in air traffic control notifications

Prediction of severity of aviation landing accidents using support vector machine models

The purpose of this study was to apply support vector machine (SVM) models to predict the severity of aircraft damage and the severity of personal injury during an aircraft approach and landing accident and to evaluate and rank the importance of 14 accident factors across 39 sub-categorical factors. Three new factors were introduced using the theory of inattentional blindness: The presence of visual area surface penetrations for a runway, the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) visual area surface penetration policy timeframe, and the type of runway approach lighting. The study comprised 1,297 aircraft approach and landing accidents at airports within the United States with at least one instrument approach procedure. Support vector machine models were developed in using the linear, polynomial, radial basis function (RBF), and sigmoid kernels for the severity of aircraft damage and additional SVM models were developed for the severity of personal injury. The SVM models using the RBF kernel produced the best machine learning models with a 96% accuracy for predicting the severity of aircraft damage (0.94 precision, 0.95 recall, and 0.95 F1-score) and a 98% accuracy for predicting the severity of personal injury (0.99 precision, 0.98 recall, and 0.99 F1-score). The top predictors across both models were the pilot's total flight hours, time of the accident, pilot's age, crosswind component, landing runway number, single-engine land certificate, and any obstacle penetration. This study demonstrates the benefit of SVM modeling using the RBF kernel for accident prediction and for datasets with categorical factors.

Peripheral vision in real-world tasks: A systematic review

Peripheral vision is fundamental for many real-world tasks, including walking, driving, and aviation. Nonetheless, there has been no effort to connect these applied literatures to research in peripheral vision in basic vision science or sports science. To close this gap, we analyzed 60 relevant papers, chosen according to objective criteria. Applied research, with its real-world time constraints, complex stimuli, and performance measures, reveals new functions of peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is used to monitor the environment (e.g., road edges, traffic signs, or malfunctioning lights), in ways that differ from basic research. Applied research uncovers new actions that one can perform solely with peripheral vision (e.g., steering a car, climbing stairs). An important use of peripheral vision is that it helps compare the position of one’s body/vehicle to objects in the world. In addition, many real-world tasks require multitasking, and the fact that peripheral vision provides degraded but useful information means that tradeoffs are common in deciding whether to use peripheral vision or move one’s eyes. These tradeoffs are strongly influenced by factors like expertise, age, distraction, emotional state, task importance, and what the observer already knows. These tradeoffs make it hard to infer from eye movements alone what information is gathered from peripheral vision and what tasks we can do without it. Finally, we recommend three ways in which basic, sport, and applied science can benefit each other’s methodology, furthering our understanding of peripheral vision more generally.

Degraded States of Engagement in Air Traffic Control

Safety studies have identified attention as a recurring cause of incidents and accidents in air traffic control. However, little is known of the precise attentional states that lead to degraded ATC performance. Therefore, we surveyed 150 French en route air traffic controllers on the causes of and impacts on perceived cooperation, safety, and performance of seven degraded attentional states from the literature: task-related and task-unrelated mind wandering, mental overload, inattentional deafness and blindness, attentional entropy, and perseveration. Our findings indicated that task-related and task-unrelated mind wandering were the most prevalent but had the least impact on perceived safety. Conversely, inattentional blindness and attentional entropy were less reported but were considered a significant safety concern, while inattentional deafness affected cooperation. Most states were experienced in workload levels consistent with the literature. However, no other factor such as shift work was identified as a cause of these states. Overall, these findings suggest that “attention” is not a specific enough subject for ATC, as attentional issues can occur in various conditions and have different impacts. As far as safety is concerned, inattentional blindness should be the prime target for further research. Neuroergonomics in particular could help develop dynamic countermeasures to mitigate its impact.

Assessing attentive monitoring levels in dynamic environments through visual neuro-assisted approach

Objective

This work aims to establish a framework in measuring the various attentional levels of the human operator in a real-time animated environment through a visual neuro-assisted approach.

Background

With the increasing trend of automation and remote operations, understanding human-machine interaction in dynamic environments can greatly aid to improve performance, promote operational efficiency and safety.

Method

Two independent 1-hour experiments were conducted on twenty participants where eye-tracking metrics and neuro activities from electroencephalogram (EEG) were recorded. The experiments required participants to exhibit attentive behaviour in one set and inattentive in the other. Two segments ("increasing flight numbers" and "relatively constant flight numbers") were also extracted to study the participants' visual behavioral differences in relation to aircraft numbers.

Results

For the two experimental studies, those in the attentive behavioral study show incidences of higher fixation count, fixation duration, number of aircraft spotted, and landing fixations whereas those in inattentive behavior study reveal higher zero-fixation frame count. In experiments involving 'increasing flight numbers', a higher percentage of aircraft were spotted as compared to those with 'constant flight numbers' in both the groups. Three parameters (number of aircraft spotted, and landing fixations and zero-fixation frame count) are newly established. As radar monitoring is a brain engagement activity, positive EEG data were registered in all the participants. A newly Task Engagement Index (TEI) was also formulated to predict different attentional levels.

Conclusion

Results provide a refined quantifiable tool to differentiate between attentive and inattentive monitoring behavior in a real-time dynamic environment, which can be applied across various sectors.

Recommendation

With the quantitative TEI established, this paves the way for future studies into attentional levels by regions, time based, as well as eye signature studies in relation to visual task engagement and management and determining expertise levels to be explored. Factors relating to fatigue could also be investigated using the TEI approach proposed.

Shared Gaze Fails to Improve Team Visual Monitoring

OBJECTIVE

The aim was to test the value of shared gaze as a way to improve team performance in a visual monitoring task.

BACKGROUND

Teams outperform individuals in monitoring tasks, but fall short of achievable levels. Shared-gaze displays offer a potential method of improving team efficiency. Within a shared-gaze arrangement, operators collaborate on a visual task, and each team member's display includes a cursor to represent the other teammates' point of regard. Past work has suggested that shared gaze allows operators to better communicate and coordinate their attentional scanning in a visual search task. The current experiments sought to replicate and extend earlier findings of inefficient team performance in a visual monitoring task, and asked whether shared gaze would improve team efficiency.

METHOD

Participants performed a visual monitoring task framed as a sonar operation. Displays were matrices of luminance patches varying in intensity. The participants' task was to monitor for occasional critical signals, patches of high luminance. In Experiment 1, pairs of participants performed the task independently, or working as teams. In Experiment 2, teams of two participants performed the task with or without shared-gaze displays.

RESULTS

In Experiment 1, teams detected more critical signals than individuals, but were statistically inefficient; detection rates were lower than predicted by a control model that assumed pairs of operators searching in isolation. In Experiment 2, shared gaze failed to increase target detection rates.

CONCLUSION AND APPLICATION

Operators collaborate inefficiently in visual monitoring tasks, and shared gaze does not improve their performance.

Common principles underlie the fluctuation of auditory and visual sustained attention

Sustained attention plays an important role in adaptive behaviours in everyday activities. As previous studies have mostly focused on vision, and attentional resources have been thought to be specific to sensory modalities, it is still unclear how mechanisms of attentional fluctuations overlap between visual and auditory modalities. To reduce the effects of sudden stimulus onsets, we developed a new gradual-onset continuous performance task (gradCPT) in the auditory domain and compared dynamic fluctuation of sustained attention in vision and audition. In the auditory gradCPT, participants were instructed to listen to a stream of narrations and judge the gender of each narration. In the visual gradCPT, they were asked to observe a stream of scenery images and indicate whether the scene was a city or mountain. Our within-individual comparison revealed that auditory and visual attention are similar in terms of the false alarm rate and dynamic properties including fluctuation frequency. Absolute timescales of the fluctuation in the two modalities were comparable, notwithstanding the difference in stimulus onset asynchrony. The results suggest that fluctuations of visual and auditory attention are underpinned by common principles and support models with a more central, modality-general controller.

A Neuroergonomics Approach to Mental Workload, Engagement and Human Performance

The assessment and prediction of cognitive performance is a key issue for any discipline concerned with human operators in the context of safety-critical behavior. Most of the research has focused on the measurement of mental workload but this construct remains difficult to operationalize despite decades of research on the topic. Recent advances in Neuroergonomics have expanded our understanding of neurocognitive processes across different operational domains. We provide a framework to disentangle those neural mechanisms that underpin the relationship between task demand, arousal, mental workload and human performance. This approach advocates targeting those specific mental states that precede a reduction of performance efficacy. A number of undesirable neurocognitive states (mind wandering, effort withdrawal, perseveration, inattentional phenomena) are identified and mapped within a two-dimensional conceptual space encompassing task engagement and arousal. We argue that monitoring the prefrontal cortex and its deactivation can index a generic shift from a nominal operational state to an impaired one where performance is likely to degrade. Neurophysiological, physiological and behavioral markers that specifically account for these states are identified. We then propose a typology of neuroadaptive countermeasures to mitigate these undesirable mental states.

The impact of alerting designs on air traffic controller's eye movement patterns and situation awareness

This research investigated controller' situation awareness by comparing COOPANS's acoustic alerts with newly designed semantic alerts. The results demonstrate that ATCOs' visual scan patterns had significant differences between acoustic and semantic designs. ATCOs established different eye movement patterns on fixations number, fixation duration and saccade velocity. Effective decision support systems require human-centered design with effective stimuli to direct ATCO's attention to critical events. It is necessary to provide ATCOs with specific alerting information to reflect the nature of the critical situation in order to minimise the side effects of startle and inattentional deafness. Consequently, the design of a semantic alert can significantly reduce ATCOs' response time, therefore providing valuable extra time in a time-limited situation to formulate and execute resolution strategies in critical air safety events. The findings of this research indicate that the context-specified design of semantic alerts could improve ATCO's situational awareness and significantly reduce response time in the event of Short Term Conflict Alert (STCA) activation which alerts to two aircraft having less than the required lateral or vertical separation. Practitioner Summary: Eye movements are closely linked with visual attention and can be analysed to explore shifting attention whilst performing monitoring tasks. This research has found that context-specific designed semantic alerts facilitated improved ATCO cognitive processing by integrating visual and auditory resources. Semantic designs have been demonstrated to be superior to acoustic design by directing the operator's attention more quickly to critical situations.Abbreviations: APW: area proximity warning; ASRS: aviation safety reporting system; ATC: air traffic control; ATCO: air traffic controller; ATM: air traffic management; COOPANS: cooperation between air navigation service providers; HCI: human-computer interaction; IAA: irish aviation authority; MSAW: minimum safe altitude warning; MTCD: medium-term conflict detection; SA: situation awareness; STCA: short term conflict alert; TP: trajectory prediction.

Redundant-target processing is robust against changes to task load

Monitoring visual displays while performing other tasks is commonplace in many operational environments. Although dividing attention between tasks can impair monitoring accuracy and response times, it is unclear whether it also reduces processing efficiency for visual targets. Thus, the current three experiments examined the effects of dual-tasking on target processing in the visual periphery. A total of 120 undergraduate students performed a redundant-target task either by itself (Experiment 1a) or in conjunction with a manual tracking task (Experiments 1b-3). Target processing efficiency was assessed using measures of workload resilience. Processing of redundant targets in Experiments 1-2 was less efficient than predicted by a standard parallel race model, giving evidence for limited-capacity, parallel processing. However, when stimulus characteristics forced participants to process targets in serial (Experiment 3), processing efficiency became super-capacity. Across the three experiments, dual-tasking had no effect on target processing efficiency. Results suggest that a central task slows target detection in the display periphery, but does not change the efficiency with which multiple concurrent targets are processed.

Supporting dynamic change detection: using the right tool for the task

Detecting task-relevant changes in a visual scene is necessary for successfully monitoring and managing dynamic command and control situations. Change blindness-the failure to notice visual changes-is an important source of human error. Change History EXplicit (CHEX) is a tool developed to aid change detection and maintain situation awareness; and in the current study we test the generality of its ability to facilitate the detection of changes when this subtask is embedded within a broader dynamic decision-making task. A multitasking air-warfare simulation required participants to perform radar-based subtasks, for which change detection was a necessary aspect of the higher-order goal of protecting one's own ship. In this task, however, CHEX rendered the operator even more vulnerable to attentional failures in change detection and increased perceived workload. Such support was only effective when participants performed a change detection task without concurrent subtasks. Results are interpreted in terms of the NSEEV model of attention behavior (Steelman, McCarley, & Wickens, Hum. Factors 53:142-153, 2011; J. Exp. Psychol. Appl. 19:403-419, 2013), and suggest that decision aids for use in multitasking contexts must be designed to fit within the available workload capacity of the user so that they may truly augment cognition.

Field of View Issues on the Flight Deck

Twenty-eight empirical studies provided data for four meta-analyses on visual detection and discrimination inflight-decktypical tasks, at varying degrees of eccentricity relative to a central point of interest. The data revealed a general trend for poorer performance at increasing eccentricity, and greater degradation when eye movements were prevented. The data failed to reveal a systematic discontinuity of performance degradation beyond 15°, which defines the typical “primary field of view” in the cockpit, but they reveal a 14% miss rate and 21% discrimination error rate at that location. The results also point to the profound influence of moderator variables of expectancy and salience on eccentric visual performance.

The Role of Cognitive and Perceptual Loads in Inattentional Deafness

The current study examines the role of cognitive and perceptual loads in inattentional deafness (the failure to perceive an auditory stimulus) and the possibility to predict this phenomenon with ocular measurements. Twenty participants performed Air Traffic Control (ATC) scenarios—in the Laby ATC-like microworld—guiding one (low cognitive load) or two (high cognitive load) aircraft while responding to visual notifications related to 7 (low perceptual load) or 21 (high perceptual load) peripheral aircraft. At the same time, participants were played standard tones which they had to ignore (probability = 0.80), or deviant tones (probability = 0.20) which they had to report. Behavioral results showed that 28.76% of alarms were not reported in the low cognitive load condition and up to 46.21% in the high cognitive load condition. On the contrary, perceptual load had no impact on the inattentional deafness rate. Finally, the mean pupil diameter of the fixations that preceded the target tones was significantly lower in the trials in which the participants did not report the tones, likely showing a momentary lapse of sustained attention, which in turn was associated to the occurrence of inattentional deafness.