Re-examining the Pioneering Studies on Eye Movements in Aviation: Connecting the Past to the Present

ABSTRACT

Objective: To reduce the gap between old and new eye-tracking studies in aviation by raising the interest of the scientific community in some of the pioneering works. We present two emblematic cases: the misattributed origin of the use of eye-tracking techniques in aviation to Paul M. Fitts and his collaborators, and the forgotten (and often reinvented) oculometer training tape technique.

Background: Over the last century, military and civilian researchers have used eye-tracking techniques to solve many challenges faced by the aviation industry, from assessing new graphical displays to testing procedural trainings. Yet, these techniques have been always classified as merely promising. The difficulty of using eye trackers outside of a laboratory environment, and the labor-intensive data extraction and interpretation procedures have long been considered a barrier to implementing eye-tracking techniques in aviation settings.

Method: We revised original scientific articles as well as military and civilian technical reports on the use of eye-tracking techniques in aviation settings from the beginning of Aviation Psychology.

Results: A systematic failure in recognizing and learning from the pioneering works might be a concomitant explanation for classifying the use of eye-tracking techniques as merely promising.

Conclusion: Taking together past and present findings, it would not be over-optimistic to state that eye-tracking finally went from being a “promising” technique in aviation to a “proven” one.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. H. Rieiro, Mind, Brain, and Behavior Research Center-CIMCYC, University of Granada, for his comments and suggestions on the manuscript. We thank three anonymous reviewers for providing insightful and constructive comments on the manuscript. Furthermore, we want to thank the General Archive for the History and the Historical Archives Service of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy) for providing access to the original documents by Dr. Agostino Gemelli.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ramón y Cajal fellowship program from the Spanish State Research Agency (RYC-2015-17483) awarded to LLDS. The funding organization had no role in the design or conduct of this research.