Research On Visual Fixation Transition Among Dynamic Objects Under Air Traffic Control Simulation

As the main body of the Air traffic control(ATC) system, they are the most important for guaranteeing the safety of the ATC system. In the process of controlling, the controllers control the aircrafts according to the information they accessed, and the information they need are almost entirely got from the vision, therefore, accessing visual information accurately and efficiently is of great significance to avoid making mistakes and ensure flight safety. Because of the development of eye tracking technology, it becomes reality that recording eye movement behavior accurately. The study of eye movement behavior will help to find the distribution and transfer rules of the air traffic controllers' attention and to provide reference and support for controller selection and training procedure.Eight senior students majored ATC were selected as experimental subjects. The experiments were carried out on a simulated radar control machine and the subjects' eye movement behavior data were recorded by the Tobii X2-60 eye tracker. Only 6 participants' experiment data were analyzed because of the low sampling rates of the other two participants'. The experiments included three kinds of control tasks: 3 flights, 5 flights and 7flights and the interfaces were divided into different number of dynamic visual areas. Trough a coordinate transformation, the aircrafts' positions and the visual fixations' positions were compared in a coordinate system, and the target or the area the subject was watching was determined. Secondly, one step state transition probability of the visual fixation data were calculated by using the Markov chain theory. Finally, the distribution and transfer rules of the limited attention were analyzed based on the assumption that the subject was fixed on the area where the visual fixation point was located.The basic conclusions are as follows:(1) Some participants will ignore one or more objects no matter how many objects need to be noticed on the screen.(2) The probabilities of remaining the fixation state in the same area via one step transition in the task of 7 flights are generally lower, compared with the values in the task of3 flights and 5 flights.(3) To the condition of the seven flights control task, the number of one step transitionprobabilities of the visual fixation that equal zero is larger than that of the three flights and the five flights.(4) The number of one step transition probabilities of the visual fixation that equal zero will be smaller if the most part of the attention was on the flights or their labels.(5) The more unequal the attention resource distributed among the visual areas, the more the probabilities of one step transition of the visual fixation equal zero.(6) More participants have a steady attention transfer mode when the flight number increases.