Eye Movements as an Indicator of Situation Awareness in a Flight Simulator Experiment

Abstract

This article discusses the potential for eye movements as a means to assess situation awareness (SA) in a flight simulator setting. In a scenario, SA was hampered by introducing a system malfunction in the form of a fuel leak that resulted in a fuel imbalance. Twelve airline pilots participated in the experiment. An eye tracker was used to track the pilot's visual scanning behavior across the areas of interest (AoIs) in the cockpit. Differences in attentional focus and scanning entropy were observed when the crews searched for the malfunction. The results provided insight into the use of fixation rates and dwell times as information acquisition indicators (Level 1 SA), and the use of entropy as an indicator of new information acquisition activities (Level 3 SA). These findings contribute to the further development and exploration of eye movement analyses as an objective indicator of SA in a civil aviation cockpit setting.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Human Integration into the Lifecycle of Aviation Systems (HILAS) project is part of the sixth framework program for aeronautics and space research, sponsored by the European Commission. The authors would like to thank the European Commission for sponsoring this research. Further, we would like to thank the HILAS flight deck technologies strand members for their contribution in the experiment. Furthermore, the authors would like to thank Dr. Fenna van Nes for her valuable contribution to the article.