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...extremely high altitude flight, they operate in areas contaminated by radiation or biotoxins, and they can withstand high-g forces that exceed human tolerance. They also eliminate the risk of pilot fatalities and have generally lower aircraft operating costs. Consequently, UAVs are expected to have an increasing role in current and future aviation (Mouloua, Gilson, & Hancock, 2003).
Although UAVs are designed to operate without an onboard pilot, these aircraft are not uncontrolled--humans are needed to perform supervisory functions and to manage systems manually when unforeseen contingencies such as malfunctions and enemy actions arise. Along that line, Mouloua et al. (2003) have indicated that operator vigilance and target search/recognition capabilities are key elements to be considered for human-centered design in UAV control. For example, consider the detection and engagement of hostile aircraft in the vicinity of a UAV, a situation proposed by Thompson (2000) as a future concept of operations. In contemporary UAVs, and most likely the next generation as well, operators are required to monitor displays throughout the duration of a mission for the intrusion of "hostiles" into the vehicle's airspace and, upon detection, assume manual control of the vehicle for targeting. Consequently, it is important to gain insights about factors that affect the ability of UAV operators to remain vigilant and to search for and recognize targets. One approach toward that goal is to determine if factors known to influence vigilance and target detection in other settings are also relevant in the control of UAVs. That strategy guided the present study.
Two factors that influence signal detection in vigilance and may have important implications for the subsequent control of UAVs are display type and event rate. Display type categorizes vigilance displays as sensory or cognitive in format. Changes in the physical attributes of stimuli are critical signals for detection in sensory displays; cognitive displays require more symbolic manipulations to define critical signals, as when observers must determine if an array of digits sums to a predetermined value (See, Howe, Warm, & Dember, 1995). An assessment of the relative advantages of sensory and cognitive displays in a UAV control task is consistent with See et al.'s (1995) suggestion that more consideration be given to the potential benefits of cognitive vigilance displays in operational research. Accordingly, target acquisition was examined in the present study in a simulated UAV control environment after observers were alerted to the presence of hostile aircraft through the use of sensory or cognitive vigilance displays.
Cognitive displays might be useful for UAV operators because signal detection is more stable over time with cognitive than with sensory displays and cognitive displays are less susceptible to the degrading effects of parallax distortions produced by observers' head movements (See et al., 1995). However, cognitive tasks have been associated with higher levels of mental demand, which may interfere with a subsequent target acquisition task (Deaton & Parasuraman, 1993; Matthews, Davies, Westerman, & Stammers, 2000). The higher level of mental demand associated with cognitive displays and the consequent greater potential for dual-task interference led us to hypothesize that a cognitive vigilance display would be less effective than a sensory display in aiding UAV operators to detect potential enemy threats.
Event rate refers to the rate of presentation of noncritical or neutral events in which critical signals for detection are embedded (Warm & Jerison, 1984). A display with a high event rate would have the advantage of permitting UAV controllers to scan more frequently for enemy targets than would one with a low event rate. However, high-event-rate displays have been found to result in poorer levels of signal detection as well as in higher subjective ratings of mental workload, as compared with displays with low event rates (Warm, Dember, & Hancock, 1996). Therefore, a low-event-rate display might be more beneficial for UAV control. That possibility was also examined in the present study.
The application of advanced interface technologies in the form of supplementary visual, auditory, and haptic cues has been useful in enhancing performance efficiency and reducing workload in several aviation-related tasks involving target detection/acquisition (Haas, Nelson, Repperger, Bolia, & Zacharias, 2001; Tannen, Nelson, Bolia, Warm, & Dember, 2004). However, direct comparisons of the three formats are sparse, and no data are available concerning the benefits of supplemental cuing on target detection in UAV control. An examination of the effects of visual, auditory, and haptic advanced cuing interfaces on target acquisition in a simulated UAV control environment was, therefore, also part of the present study. The phenomenon of "shift cost," in which performance efficiency is degraded on a target task when observers must alternate between tasks that demand different forms of information processing (Monsell, 2003; Styles, 1997), led us to hypothesize that visual cuing would be superior to auditory and haptic cuing in locating enemy icons in the UAV control system because only with the visual cue would the sensory architecture of information processing be similar.
METHOD
Participants
Sixteen naive observers (8 men and 8 women) from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) served in the study. They were paid $40 for their participation. Observers ranged in age from 18 to 26 with a mean age of 22 years; all had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and were right-handed.
Global UAV Control Scenario
The UAV control task required observers...
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