Perception and Behavioral Phase Coherence Zones in Passive and Active Control Tasks in Yaw

Abstract

Although realism in flight simulation is often studied from either a perception or a pilot control behavior point of view, a more complete approach should consider a combination of perception and behavior. This paper aims to relate perception and behavior by comparing which levels of phase mismatch between visual and inertial cues lead to loss of perceptual coherence and which phase mismatches result in a significant change of pilot control behavior. In a passive experiment, perception coherence zones are measured using visual and inertial stimulus profiles that are representative of the cues typically found in manual tracking tasks. Then, based on the results of the passive experiment, the effect of different levels of phase mismatch on pilot control behavior is studied in an active manual tracking task. The passive results show an overall phase-mismatch threshold of 16.4 deg for different types of stimulus profiles. The results of the active experiment showed an increase in crossover frequency when inertial motion was added, followed by a gradual decrease in crossover frequency with increasing phase mismatch. There was no clear level of phase mismatch for which the crossover frequencies indicated a sudden change in pilot control behavior, hence no clear behavior coherence zone could be defined, but a gradual degradation of the behavioral metrics with respect to a zero phase-mismatch condition was found. Combining the passive and active results, it could be concluded that perceptual coherence was lost at a lower level of phase mismatch than the phase mismatch at which behavior was significantly different from the condition with no phase mismatch.