The effects of task difficulty on gaze behaviour during landing with visual flight rules in low-time pilots
DOI: 10.16910/jemr.16.1.3
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Summary
This study investigates how task difficulty influences the gaze behavior of low-time pilots (those with fewer than 300 flight hours) during simulated landing scenarios under visual flight rules. Motivated by the high rate of human error in aviation accidents and the need to understand information processing during early skill development, the research addresses a gap in existing literature, which has largely focused on experienced pilots or used time-averaging gaze metrics that ignore dynamic scanning patterns. The authors aimed to clarify conflicting previous findings by employing both traditional gaze metrics and advanced entropy-based measures to characterize visual attention in novice pilots. The experimental design involved 18 participants, primarily aviation students, who completed 20 simulated landing trials in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 using a Cessna 152 configuration. The trials were divided into 10 "easy" conditions (high visibility, low wind) and 10 "difficult" conditions (high visibility, high wind). Eye movements were recorded using an EyeLink II eye-tracker at 500 Hz. The visual environment was discretized into ten areas of interest (AOIs), including seven cockpit instruments and three external cues (runway, horizon, side window). The study utilized stationary gaze entropy (SGE) to measure gaze dispersion and gaze transition entropy (GTE) to assess the complexity of fixation sequences, alongside traditional metrics like dwell time and fixation frequency. Results indicated that increased task difficulty significantly impacted both performance and gaze behavior. Pilots took longer to complete difficult trials and achieved lower overall performance scores compared to easy trials. Gaze analysis revealed that under difficult conditions, pilots exhibited longer fixation durations on the runway and a reduction in both SGE and GTE. This decrease in entropy signifies that pilots’ gaze patterns became less complex and more focused, with reduced dispersion across AOIs and more predictable, repetitive scanning sequences. Additionally, the study validated a novel method for tracking "gaze tunneling"—instances where pilots restrict attention outside the cockpit—demonstrating its sensitivity to changes in task difficulty. The findings suggest that as sensorimotor demands increase, low-time pilots adopt a more focal mode of visual attention, concentrating on fewer critical areas rather than maintaining broad situational awareness. This shift toward simplified gaze patterns may reflect a strategy to manage increased workload or a failure to adequately monitor the broader task environment. The study concludes that combining traditional gaze metrics with entropy-based analyses provides a comprehensive, non-invasive tool for assessing pilot competence and understanding the cognitive underpinnings of performance. These insights have significant implications for aviation training, offering objective methods to evaluate and improve the visual scanning strategies of novice pilots during critical phases of flight.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | DOAJ | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| archive | success | unpaywall | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-25 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-18 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-25; verification: verified.
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- Empirical Findings: behavioral performance data