Evidence of elevated situational awareness for active duty soldiers during navigation of a virtual environment

U.S. service members maintain constant situational awareness (SA) due to training and experience operating in dynamic and complex environments. Work examining how military experience impacts SA during visual search of a complex naturalistic environment, is limited. Here, we compare Active Duty service members and Civilians’ physiological behavior during a navigational visual search task in an open-world virtual environment (VE) while cognitive load was manipulated. We measured eye-tracking and electroencephalogram (EEG) outcomes from Active Duty (N = 21) and Civilians (N = 15) while they navigated a desktop VE at a self-regulated pace. Participants searched and counted targets (N = 15) presented among distractors, while cognitive load was manipulated with an auditory Math Task. Results showed Active Duty participants reported significantly greater/closer to the correct number of targets compared to Civilians. Overall, Active Duty participants scanned the VE with faster peak saccade velocities and greater average saccade magnitudes compared to Civilians. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) response (EEG P-300) was significantly weighted more to initial fixations for the Active Duty group, showing reduced attentional resources on object refixations compared to Civilians. There were no group differences in fixation outcomes or overall CNN response when comparing targets versus distractor objects. When cognitive load was manipulated, only Civilians significantly decreased their average dwell time on each object and the Active Duty group had significantly fewer numbers of correct answers on the Math Task. Overall, the Active Duty group explored the VE with increased scanning speed and distance and reduced cognitive re-processing on objects, employing a different, perhaps expert, visual search strategy indicative of increased SA. The Active Duty group maintained SA in the main visual search task and did not appear to shift focus to the secondary Math Task. Future work could compare how a stress inducing environment impacts these groups’ physiological or cognitive markers and performance for these groups.