Department of Experimental Psychology, Liverpool University, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2012;7(9):e44381. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044381. Epub 2012 Sep 5.
We argue that objective fidelity evaluation of virtual environments, such as flight simulation, should be human-performance-centred and task-specific rather than measure the match between simulation and physical reality. We show how principled experimental paradigms and behavioural models to quantify human performance in simulated environments that have emerged from research in multisensory perception provide a framework for the objective evaluation of the contribution of individual cues to human performance measures of fidelity. We present three examples in a flight simulation environment as a case study: Experiment 1: Detection and categorisation of auditory and kinematic motion cues; Experiment 2: Performance evaluation in a target-tracking task; Experiment 3: Transferrable learning of auditory motion cues. We show how the contribution of individual cues to human performance can be robustly evaluated for each task and that the contribution is highly task dependent. The same auditory cues that can be discriminated and are optimally integrated in experiment 1, do not contribute to target-tracking performance in an in-flight refuelling simulation without training, experiment 2. In experiment 3, however, we demonstrate that the auditory cue leads to significant, transferrable, performance improvements with training. We conclude that objective fidelity evaluation requires a task-specific analysis of the contribution of individual cues.
我们认为，虚拟环境（如飞行模拟）的客观保真度评估应该以人类绩效为中心，针对特定任务，而不是衡量模拟与物理现实之间的匹配程度。我们展示了如何从多感官感知研究中出现的原则性实验范式和行为模型来量化人类在模拟环境中的表现，为客观评估单个线索对人类表现保真度测量的贡献提供了框架。我们在飞行模拟环境中提供了三个示例作为案例研究：实验 1：听觉和运动线索的检测和分类；实验 2：目标跟踪任务中的性能评估；实验 3：听觉运动线索的可转移学习。我们表明，对于每个任务，都可以稳健地评估单个线索对人类表现的贡献，并且贡献高度依赖于任务。在实验 1 中可以区分和最佳整合的相同听觉线索，在没有训练的情况下，在飞行加油模拟中不会对目标跟踪性能产生贡献，实验 2。然而，在实验 3 中，我们证明了听觉线索在训练后会导致显著的、可转移的性能提升。我们得出结论，客观保真度评估需要针对特定任务分析单个线索的贡献。
