I conduct research in air traffic control - or air traffic management. The organizations that introduce of many new technologies and procedures (program offices) all would like the air traffic controller to see the new data that comes with these new technologies and procedures displayed on the aircraft representation. My hypothesis so far has been that expert controllers have - through perceptual learning - managed to absorb between 7 and 10 data elements in a single fixation. Their fixations are on average longer than what you would expect if they would read each element in a separate fixation.
The questions I have are:
The air traffic controller's job is very dynamic and visually oriented. To provide you some context I have attached a snapshot from a radar display used in one of our recent studies.
I am looking forward to any insights you might have - not just from the air traffic control domain, but from other domains (e.g. maritime vessel management, freight tracking, etc.) and from academia as well.
If you are interested in some of the research we do, I have a link to our publications attached.
http://hf.tc.faa.gov
Ben,
This may help, if you're interested in letter recognition:
Bill
http://gandalf.psych.umn.edu/users/legge/read20.pdf
You may be interested in this article on the related topic of visual working memory: http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2122354
This suggests a move away from simple 'slot' models ('observer X can extract 7 +/- 2 bits of information from a scene'), to thinking about visual information extraction in terms of continuously distributed resources.
Also, may be worth considering this: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=84599&fileId=S0140525X0161392X
Regarding what constitutes a single 'chunk' (and/or 'bit') of sensory information.
@Robert_Hutton - I am quite familiar with Klein's work on expert behavior. The problem that we are dealing with is that our controllers are experts at what they are doing. Controllers recognize the solution, but to be able to do so, they need to be able to perceive the situation. At the moment we are tinkering with the basic building blocks that controllers use to build their model of that situation. I fully agree with you that controllers are not thinking in chunks of characters, or even chunks of aircraft, but not knowing what the impact of changing the basic building blocks puts them at risk to no longer being able to use their expertise. Compare it to changing the layout of a chessboard for chess masters or changing the content of the fields in a data block with Chinese characters.
What do we really know about experts that have looked at the display format for several decades? How many aircraft can they track? How much can they see in the periphery? I have worked with controllers for 20 years and I still don't have the answers, but I am trying to find if others have looked at similar issues before.
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