Paper Abstract
"We propose a continuous situation awareness (SA) assessment method based on eye-tracking and on-line display analysis. In our method, an explicit representation of the pilot’s knowledge about the situation is constructed, which contains the pilot’s perceived state of the system. To quantify SA for different information relevant to a task, the perceived state is compared to a ground truth to compute a metric of accordance between the pilot’s situational picture and the system state. We evaluate this method in a fast jet cockpit simulator experiment with pilots, both professional and in training, from the German Air Force. The participant had to fly a demanding low-level route while reporting threats appearing at random times. We hypothesized, that low accordance between system state and pilot awareness predicts long response time in threat report, low performance in the flight altitude and low subjective SA. Results show, that pilot performance in the low-level flight was correlated to measured average accordance in the aircrafts altitude. Further, subjective SA ratings showed positive association to our measurement results. Response time did not correlate with the measured SA. Apart from that, our measurement approach identified grave decrements for individual participants in the perceptual level of SA, suited for assistance system interventions. We conclude, that the proposed measurement is a promising method to enable assistance systems adapting to the pilot’s mental state."

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