Inattentional Deafness in Simulated Air Traffic Control Tasks: A Behavioral and P300 Analysis

Giraudet, Louise; Berenger, Marie; Imbert Sébastien Tremblay Mickaël Causse, Jean-Paul · 2019 · Crossref

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100219

archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified

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Summary

This study investigates inattentional deafness—the failure to perceive fully audible stimuli due to attentional engagement in a primary task—within the context of simulated Air Traffic Control (ATC). Motivated by the safety-critical nature of ATC environments where operators must monitor visual displays while remaining vigilant to auditory alarms, the research aims to identify physiological indicators of this phenomenon. Specifically, the authors examine whether the P300 event-related potential, a neural marker of attention allocation, correlates with missed auditory alarms under varying levels of perceptual and cognitive load. The experiment involved 36 participants (after excluding six due to EEG issues) who performed tasks using the LABY microworld simulation. Participants managed a central aircraft’s route and altitude while monitoring peripheral static aircraft for visual notifications. Simultaneously, they completed an auditory oddball task, requiring them to detect and respond to rare deviant tones (alarms) amidst frequent standard tones. The study manipulated visual load (5 vs. 20 peripheral aircraft) and cognitive load (slow vs. fast simulation speed) across four scenarios. A control condition, where participants performed only the auditory task, served as a baseline. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded to measure P300 amplitudes, and subjective workload was assessed using the NASA Task Load Index. Behavioral results indicated that participants missed 4.6% of alarms during the dual-task ATC scenarios, compared to only 1% in the control condition. This significant drop in detection rate confirms that the visual ATC task induced inattentional deafness. Physiologically, the P300 amplitude associated with auditory alarms was significantly lower during the ATC task (M = 2.55 µV) than in the control condition (M = 4.57 µV), suggesting reduced attentional resources allocated to auditory processing. However, neither visual nor cognitive load manipulations significantly affected alarm detection rates or P300 amplitudes. Instead, increased load negatively impacted performance on the primary ATC tasks and visual notification detection, indicating that participants may have compensated by prioritizing the auditory task to maintain performance, despite the overall reduction in attentional capacity. The findings demonstrate that P300 amplitude serves as a valid physiological indicator of vulnerability to inattentional deafness in complex environments. The study concludes that even under moderate workload conditions, operators remain susceptible to missing critical auditory warnings. These results have practical implications for human factors engineering, suggesting that P300 monitoring could facilitate real-time detection of attentional lapses and inform the design of more effective warning systems in safety-critical domains like aviation.

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Topics

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• auditory
• signal detection theory