Eye scanning behavior as a discriminator of instrument- and scenery-centered flight task.

Aircraft pilot's eye scanning behavior represented by saccadic amplitudes and dwelling time of eye movements is a promising indicator of discrimination whether some flight task is instrument- or scenery-centered. The saccadic amplitude seems to reflect spatial and temporal values of target information. The dwelling time or gaze duration reflects the changing rate of visual information, amounts extracted from and density and complexity of the target information, or experience level of a relevant pilot. This study is for confirming the validity of the above indicator to discriminate the two types of flight tasks, instrument- and scenery-centered tasks. Five jet aircraft pilots, aged 25 to 32, participated in this experiment. A flight simulator equipped with a computer generated visual scene (field of view: 116 degree (H) x 25 degree (V)) was used. Five kinds of flight tasks were selected. These were takeoff, level flight, low-airspeed flight, acrobatic flight (minimum timed turn), and landing. These tasks were selected with the difference in degree of instrument- or scenery-centered flight, by the pilots' comments. Eye movements during simulator flight were recorded by a conventional electrooculographic apparatus with an 12-channel polygraph system. Analogue data from the amplifiers was digitized at a sampling rate of 2 kHz, and stored in a computer system. Horizontal components of eye movements by flight task were analyzed. Mean saccadic amplitudes (microV) showed significant differences among flight tasks, and no significance between subjects was obtained. The largest mean amplitude was in the acrobatic flight, and the smallest was in the low-airspeed flight.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)