Bottom-up and Top-down Contributors to Pilot Perceptions of Display Clutter in Advanced Flight Deck Technologies

Abstract

Future concepts for the National Airspace System rely on technologies, such as synthetic and enhanced vision systems, to support flight efficiency associated with improved terrain and traffic awareness. While these technologies provide the pilot access to information not available with traditional flight instrumentation, the presentation of this additional information may serve to produce display clutter, thus inhibiting the processes and tasks they are designed to support. An experiment was conducted to assess pilot perceptions and identification of both bottom-up (data-driven) and top-down (knowledge-driven) contributing factors to display clutter. Results revealed the importance of both visual and information density (bottom-up and top-down factors, respectively) to the perception of clutter. Although added display elements provided pilots with critical flight information, pilots considered displays to be cluttered when the imposed visual density exceeded the information density required for specific flight tasks. These findings suggest that moderate levels of display clutter may be tolerable, to the extent that the information is relevant to the tasks at hand.