<title>Individual differences in visual behavior in simulated flight</title>

Abstract

Flying an aircraft is highly visually demanding. It is very important to map pilot visual behaviour, both for the purpose of evaluating the cockpit interface and to effectively integrate it with future adaptive interfaces and decision support systems. Pilots' visual behaviour was studied in two experiments. In the first experiment commercial aviation pilots were flying a commercial aviation scenario and eye point of gaze, and eye blinks were collected. In the second experiment military pilots were flying an air-to-air combat scenario and the visual behaviour was video recorded. In both of the experiments the results show individual differences in the pilots' visual behaviour. In the second experiment two different categories of eye blinks were found that might help explain the individual differences in visual behaviour. One category can be related to the systematic eye blinks found to occur when the eye point of gaze was changed between head-up/head-down and head-down/head-up. The other category could be related to other reasons, such as, mental workload or visual demands.