Attentional costs and failures in air traffic control notifications

Abstract

Large display screens are common in supervisory tasks, meaning that alerts are often perceived in peripheral vision. Five air traffic control notification designs were evaluated in their ability to capture attention during an ongoing supervisory task, as well as their impact on the primary task. A range of performance measures, eye-tracking and subjective reports showed that colour, even animated, was less effective than movement, and notifications sometimes went unnoticed. Designs that drew attention to the notified aircraft by a pulsating box, concentric circles or the opacity of the background resulted in faster perception and no missed notifications. However, the latter two designs were intrusive and impaired primary task performance, while the simpler animated box captured attention without an overhead cognitive cost. These results highlight the need for a holistic approach to evaluation, achieving a balance between the benefits for one aspect of performance against the potential costs for another.

Practitioner summary: We performed a holistic examination of air traffic control notification designs regarding their ability to capture attention during an ongoing supervisory task. The combination of performance, eye-tracking and subjective measurements demonstrated that the best design achieved a balance between attentional power and the overhead cognitive cost to primary task performance.

Keywords::

• air traffic control
• visual notifications
• attentional capture
• detection
• eye movement

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Roland Alonso (researcher in ergonomics) and François Marais, Philippe Ribet, Daniel Etienne and Anthony Marion (research engineers) for programming the LABY microworld. This work was supported by the R&D department of the French civil aviation (DSNA/DTI/R&D) and Réseau thématique de recherche avancée Sciences et Technologies pour l'Aéronautique et l'Espace (RTRA STAE). Support was also provided by a Discovery grant from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, awarded to Sébastien Tremblay ‘[grant number CG073877]’.