Driven by global expansion and accessibility of air travel, over the next 20 years approximately 790,000 new pilots are expected to be recruited to meet demand (Boeing Technician and Pilot Outlook, 2018). With 3291 new pilots needed per month to meet this target, significant strain will be placed on the current training system-more trainers will be required, and new training facilities will need to be built. Another potential solution to this problem involves the modification of the current training procedure-for example, the development of advanced technology that can be used as an adjunct to standard training, such as virtual reality (VR). VR training has the advantage of being significantly cheaper, smaller, and thereby more accessible, compared to standard flight training simulators. This provides the opportunity for offsite training, with expert trainers being able to remotely access and assist their students. VR systems will soon be fully equipped with sophisticated eye tracking technology. A significant amount of information regarding the pilot's thought processes and the distribution of attention can be gleaned through the movement of the eyes. A current trend in human factors research is for novices to model the 'gold standard' gaze behaviour of experts. It is thought that if they train from the beginning to utilise the gaze strategies employed by experts, they could become more proficient in a shorter period of time. However, this whole theory relies on the fact that expert pilots physically move their eyes to every item they are attending to. While that may be true the majority of time (Just & Carpenter, 1980), it is now widely accepted that people can covertly attend to a stimulus in their peripheral vision (covert attention; Posner, 1980). Further, there is evidence that experts have an ability to spread their attention more widely than a novice, i.e. have a greater perceptual span. Therefore, an expert may be covertly attending to crucial information within their visual periphery, which standard eye tracking methods would not pick up. Although much has been looked into the relationship between expertise and xi
A substantial question in understanding expert behavior is isolating where experts look, and which aspects of their environment they process. While tracking the position of gaze provides some insight into this process, our ability to attend covertly to regions of space other than the current point of fixation, severely limits the diagnostic power of such data. Over the past decade, evidence has emerged suggesting that microscopic eye movements present during periods of fixation may be linked to the spatial distribution of covert attention, potentially offering a powerful tool for studying expert behavior. To date, the majority of studies in this field have tested the link under the constraints of a trial by trial, forced-response task. In the current study we sought to examine the effect when participants performed a continuous, divided-attention task, with the hope of bridging the gap to a range of more ecological, real-world tasks. We report various aspects of the eye movement and response data including (i) the relationship between microsaccades and drift correction, (ii) response behavior in brief time periods immediately following a microsaccade, (iii) response behavior briefly preceding a microsaccade. Analysis failed to reveal a link between task accuracy and the direction of a microsaccade. Most striking however, we found evidence for a timelocked relationship between the side of space responded to and the direction of the most recent microsaccade. The paper hence provides preliminary evidence that microsaccades may indeed be used to track the ongoing allocation of spatial attention.
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