Effects of air route alternation and display design on an operator’s situation awareness, task performance and mental workload in simulated flight tasks

Air route alternation caused by unexpected events in abnormal or emergency situations often produces adverse consequences on an operator’s cognition and behavior in flight tasks. Under such a circumstance, it is especially necessary to examine the utility of the interaction displays usually designed based on the routine environment. This study was aimed to investigate the effects of air route alternation and display design on operators’ situation awareness (SA), task performance and mental workload during simulated flight tasks. Twenty-four participants attended an experiment where they were instructed to perform simulated flight tasks with three types of display designs in both air-route-as-planned and air-route-altered conditions. Subjective measures, behavioral measures and eye movement measures were adopted to assess the participants’ SA, task performance and mental workload. The results show that unexpected air route alternation increases mental workload as well as deteriorates the SA and task performance due to the gap between attention resource demand and supply. Reducing the demand of the operator’s attention resource should be the focus when coping with unexpected events in abnormal situations. In addition, reasonable information layout, such as a center-layout design of the critical decision-making information, is more important than information salience for improving the SA and task performance in abnormal situations. Nevertheless, indicators with a high-salience design, such as a more open window design and immersive design, are still worth recommending.