Why Pilots Miss the Green Box: How Display Context Undermines Attention Capture

Visual displays often employ the onset or flashing of an element to notify users of im-portant events. Recent research findings and operational experiences in data-rich, event-driven domains, such as aviation, suggest that this design approach, which was supported by findings from early basic research on attention capture, is not always successful. The goal of this study was to examine how display context affects the ef-fectiveness of abrupt onset signals. Participants in this study performed an externally paced visual task while trying to detect abrupt-onset stimuli, which were presented against 5 different display backgrounds and at 2 different eccentricities. The display background varied in terms of its dynamics and its color similarity to the target. Color similarity, the movement of background elements, and increasing target eccentricity resulted in reduced detection performance. The findings from this study help explain why pilots on modern flight decks sometimes miss changes in the status and behavior of their automated systems. More generally, they illustrate the importance of consid-ering display context and the need to adapt findings from laboratory research when designing interfaces for complex environments. Operators in highly automated, data-rich, event-driven domains, such as aviation, are required to track many concurrent, and sometimes unexpected, changes and events. Because of limited attentional resources and an often large amount of avail-able data, these operators could benefit considerably from more effective external attention guidance. Display designers routinely use the onset or flashing of a dis-