The relevance of ocular behaviour to spatial memory bias in aviation

Overview & Synopsis

The purpose of this study is to determine whether visual anticipation based on spatial memory bias (SMB), be it forward or backward, can be used to assess the trainee's air skills. Blättler et al. [1] have shown a higher tendency for forward SMB among experienced pilots than among inexperienced ones. However, do pilots extract more appropriate visual information to produce this forward SMB than novices or do they improve their memory traces through top-down processes? Eyetracking was used to explore this. Pilots and novices were shown real world dynamic landing scenes in ego-motion [2] during a task dedicated to evaluating SMB. This is the first SMB study in the aviation field where eye-tracking data have been recorded. The results show that gaze fixation modulates visual anticipation for experienced people solely. These results contribute to the vector addition model [3] by adding gaze fixations as a characteristic fostering visual anticipation.