Repeated Induction of Inattentional Blindness in a Simulated Aviation Environment

Abstract

The study reported herein is a subset of a larger investigation on the role of automation in the context of the flight deck and used a fixed-based, human-in-the-loop simulator. This portion explored the relationship between automation and inattentional blindness (IB) occurrences in repeated induction using two types of runway incursions directly relevant to primary task performance. Sixty non-pilot participants performed the final five minutes of a landing scenario twice in one of three automation condition: full automation (FA), partial automation (PA), and no automation (NA). The first induction resulted in a 70% detection failure rate and the second induction resulted in a 50% detection failure rate. Detection improved in all conditions. IB group membership (IB vs. Detection) in the FA condition showed the most improvement and rated the Mental Demand and Effort subscales of the NASA-TLX significantly higher for Time 2 compared Time 1. Participants in the FA condition used the experience of IB exposure to reallocate attentional resources and improve task performance. These findings support the role of engagement in attention detriment and the consideration of attentional failure causation to select appropriate mitigation strategies.