The Effectiveness of Gaze Guidance Lines in supporting JTAC’s Attention Allocation

Abstract

We examined the utility of gaze guidance lines to facilitate the direction of attention between features on a minimap and their counterparts in a virtually rendered visual scene (Experiment 1) and between described features in the visual scene and their location on the minimap (Experiment 2); the experiment was designed to simulate a critical element of scene understanding for joint tactical attack controller (JTAC) communications with an attack pilot. In each experiment participants encountered 40 scenarios, half supported by a gaze guidance line and half without. The results of both experiments yielded a large and significant benefit of the gaze guidance line over the control condition, expressed in both speed and accuracy. The results of Experiment 2 however revealed some evidence that the gaze guidance lines led to an automation bias when the automation algorithm, creating the lines, misidentified a landmark in the visual scene.