FAA Office of Aerospace Medicine
Civil Aerospace Medical Institute

Report No: DOT/FAA/AM-19/13

Title and Subtitle: Display Compellingness: A literature review

Report Date: September 2018

Authors: Wickens CD, Yeh M

Abstract: Avionics, such as synthetic vision systems, head-up displays, and electronic flight bags, have been described as being "compelling" but such a description is not quantifiable, compellingness is a property of the display, that attracts attention (a cognitive behavior), at the expense of attention allocated to other tasks and to other displays, for a long duration of time.

Compellingness can be beneficial; e.g., when attention is drawn to information when that information is time-critical (e.g., compelling alerts) or when information is presented in such a way that it reduces the "cost" of accessing or integrating that information.

However, compellingness may also have negative impacts, and such prolonged attention has been referred to attentional tunneling (to the physical world) or cognitive tunneling (to a single task relative to the array of tasks confronting the pilot).

The purpose of this paper was to try to establish a link between the physical features of display compellingness and the manifestations of cognitive/attentional tunneling to identify features that lead to compellingness and gather metrics to define it.

Key Words: Compellineness, Attention, Ownship, Electronic FlightBag (EFB), Eye Tracking, Low Visibility, Taxi

No. of Pages: 18