The eye activity measurement of mental workload based on basic flight task

Abstract

The traditional measurement method of pilot's mental workload is subjective measurement, which is difficult to implement real-time measurement. Much work has done on the eye activity measurement for mental workload, but most of the work just found the relationship between eye movement indexes and mental workload, which did not show how to evaluate mental workload by eye activity measurement. The goal of the research is to find the application method of eye activity measurement on pilot's mental workload. The aim of this article is to search for the eye movement indices, which can reflect the mental workload in basic flight task. The button operation experiment is achieved by C programming software. There are nine experiment trials of different interval time. Subjects were required to press the keyboard key corresponding with the letter appearing on the screen. The eye indices were recorded by eye tracking. Subjective survey was conducted on time pressure and mental workload. Operation results were recorded in experimental procedures. In our experiment, the analysis of experimental results showed that pupil size, average fixation time, fixation frequency, saccade frequency and average saccade velocity changed with the mental workload significantly. No certain conclusion was obtained concerning the relation between blink frequency and mental workload. The research results will provide experimental basic for the workload measurement of flight task by eye activity movement.