Date of Award

Spring 1996

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Aeronautical Science

Department

Aeronautical Science

Committee Chair

John A. Wise

Committee Member

John E. Deaton

Committee Member

Daniel J. Garland

Abstract

Quickened displays have a severe limitation in that they do not give any indication of status information, and therefore no indication of actual error. It was hypothesized in this study that a display with both quickened and status information would enable the operator to make more effective control responses than either a status alone display, or a quickened alone display.

A horizontal axis pursuit tracking task was developed and controlled by eighteen participants with three display types: (1) a status alone display; (2) a quickened alone display; and (3) a status and quickened combined display.

The primary hypothesis was only partly accepted. The results indicated that after two minutes tracking time the combined and quickened displays give the best performance, with worse performance from the status display. After ten minutes tracking time the combined display was the best, followed by the status display and the quickened display.

The study concluded that the use of a combined display did yield superior performance for the tracking task devised. The effectiveness of the combined display relative to the quickened display or the status display was, however, a function of practice time.

Download

Share

COinS