Abstract

Motivation/Research approach - An exploratory study was conducted to investigate whether eye movement metrics discriminate between different air traffic control tasks. Findings/Design - The results show the three tasks elicit different eye movement, as Yarbus (1967) also showed in static pictures, and that a number of eye tracking metrics demonstrate the differences. Research limitations/Implications - The effect was demonstrated using only one participant. The results can be used to further study various eye movement metrics. Originality/Value - The research demonstrates that different calculus distinguishes between tasks allowing targeting specific support given the type of task. Take away message - A combination of eye tracker metrics discriminates between tasks helping to provide flexible task support. © 2011 Authors.

Abstract

Future air traffic is expected to grow increasingly, opening up a gap for task dependent automation and adaptive interfaces, helping the Air Traffic Controller to cope with fluctuating workloads. One of the challenging factors in the application of such intelligent systems concerns the question what the operator is doing in order to optimize support and minimize automation surprises. This study questions whether eye metrics are able to determine what task the operator is engages in. We therefore examined A) if the eye-path would differ for three different ATC tasks and B) whether this effect can be quantified with six eye-metrics. In an experiment, the six eye-metrics were calculated and used as a dependent variable. The results show that some tasks can be inferred by eye movement metrics and other metrics infer workload, although none inferred by both task and workload. Copyright 2014 ACM.