Analysis Of Eye-movement Characteristic For Student Pilots During Simulated Flight Tasks

Aircraft is more and more automated,and the pilots are monitors and decision makers more than manipulator.Pilots need to allocate attention to multiple information and select the priority to process in cockpit during flight.They identify information in a short time and have high cognitive load.Early flight training provides the best opportunity to improve visual performance,and the difference of eye movement in analysis have a particular meaning.The impacts of eye movement from the existing experiments were sorted out,which can help to select the independent variables and the control disturbance variables.Referred to relevant cognitive theories and models,I analysed the relationship between eye movement,movement of attention and cognitive processes,and the cognitive behavior in pilot-aircraft interaction.The searching and coding of visual information could be associated with the gaze and saccade.There is a certain relationship between saccade amplitude and attention span,visual entropy and attention stability,AOI fixation percentage and attention allocation,fixation frequency and cognitive load.On this foundation,the dependent variables were selected.Ten student pilots who got private pilot certificate,commercial pilot certificate and instrument rating were invited to this eye movement experiment.The CCAR-61 and the training subjects for student pilots were the basis on tasks setting.Pilot performed aerodrome traffic circuit which have five flight phase include departure leg,crosswind leg,downwind leg,base leg and final leg during day and night.The eye movement indexes under the ten flight conditions were measured.The display was divided into seven AOI,which could be integrate into four dimension tracking include vertical tracking,horizontal tracking,airspeed tracking and out view tracking.NASA-TLX was used to measure the task load of simulated flight which was the basis on the analysis of the eye movement characteristics.Data analysis showed that:(1)The attention span of student pilots shrunk during difficult simulated flight tasks and their cognitive load increased in the meantime.(2)Student pilots in the nighttime tended to have relatively worse attention span and attention stability and higher cognitive load than in the daytime.They reduced the gazing points on external and speed instruments information,and paid more attention to the vertical and horizontal information of aircrafts in the nighttime flight.(3)The attention span of student pilots is worse during departure leg and final leg,and student pilots also had bad attention stability from low the value of visual entropy during and final leg.The information coding frequency between two adjacent flight phase was not distinctly different,the level of their cognitive load is equivalent.They intended to get more information from the outside and airspeed indicator during departure leg and final leg,and get more information from the attitude indicator during crosswind leg,downwind leg and base leg.The results of the experiment could serve as basis to correct erroneous eye movements,reinforce the training effect and evaluate the flight tasks.