Communication facilitates focused monitoring and anticipation of critical events: evidence from eye movements

The present study investigates the impact of communication availability on monitoring behaviour in a team. A monitoring task was designed to compare participants who were not allowed to communicate with those allowed to communicate while monitoring an automated system and deciding repeatedly whether critical events would turn into failures. Four monitoring phases were distinguished around every critical event: identification, verification, anticipation, and detection. Eye-tracking parameters obtained during these phases were related to relevant areas of interest. Results show that the opportunity to communicate increases the proportion of attention on relevant events, particularly during anticipation, and leads to faster fixations on failures during detection.