Dual displays

The study examined whether the simultaneous presentation of different map displays can aid situational awareness in spatial tasks relying on ego-centred and world-centred reference frames. Two commonly used aircraft displays, track-up and north-up maps, were compared with a dual aircraft display consisting of both track-up and north-up maps. Participants took part in two tasks: one relied on an ego-centred reference frame (ERF) and the other on a world-centred reference frame (WRF). The ERF task involved left/right judgements with respect to the aircraft's current heading while in the WRF task participants were asked to identify the compass heading associated with a landmark. A moderate amount of training resulted in a significant improvement with the dual maps in both the WRF task (relative to track-up maps) and the ERF task (relative to north-up maps). The findings are discussed with reference to how attention is allocated to visual displays.