Conflict warnings and the search and detection of collisions in a simulated ATC-like task

An experiment assessed the effects of properties of a warning system on visual search patterns and collision detection efficiency in a simulated air traffic control-like task. Participants had to detect collisions between pairs of objects before they occurred. They were assisted by warning systems that had different levels of reliability and gave a warning either 5 or 15 seconds prior to a collision. The participants' eye-movements were recorded. The detection of the collisions was not affected by the timing of the warning, but only by the reliability of the warning system. However, visual search patterns differed markedly between early and late warnings. A metric was developed to calculate an "attention value" out of the eye-movement data. The metric corresponds well to the behavior of the participants in the different experimental conditions. This may be particularly important for the analysis of real air traffic control tasks.