Cognitive Quality and Situational Awareness with Advanced Aircraft Attitude Displays

Abstract

Highly agile combat aircraft create demanding requirements for the cognitive quality of aircraft attitude information. Evidence is presented on aircrew decision-making performance on simulated attitude recovery tasks requiring situational awareness with different types of attitude representation. Pictorial aircraft “outside-looking-in” attitude representations appear to require cognitive rotation prior to response selection. A pictorial Command Indicator (CI), with only small attitude deflections, generated relatively low processing demands, without increasing situational awareness. A contact analog Attitude Indicator (AI) representation was superior to relatively less familiar Head-Up Display (HUD) pitch scale, even when switching attention between references. The supremacy of AIs is attributed to the greater accessibility and compatibility of appropriate “inside-looking-out” cognitive schemata. HUD representations create relatively low understanding of situations, but appropriate schemata may become more accessible with HUD training.