Analyzing positive and negative effects of salience in air traffic control tasks

Abstract

We focus on visual attention as a high-impact perception in the accurate and efficient ATC tasks, which demand high cognitive workloads. Our goal is to develop a screen design policy considering salience of information. Salience is one of the user interface elements causing users’ visual attention. We carried out an experiment to clarify relationships between the degree of salience gaps and the performance of ATC tasks and we will develop a screen design policy based on the relationships. As a result, the lager the salience gaps between important and unimportant airplanes were, the shorter the reaction time for replying situation awareness queries became. The larger the salience gaps among airplanes were, the better instruction timing was obtained. On the other hand, on the screen design with a large salience gap, the performance of sub task for the airplanes displayed with a low salience delayed than that without salience gaps. From these results, we conclude that our hypotheses were supported.