Computer monitoring required to be done by pilots is a near-impossible task for humans, even with the best training and equipments, according to a NASA-initiated study which suggests that such tasks should be for robots.
The study paired NASA's research psychologist, Steve Casner, with Jonathan Schooler, a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara to examine why monitoring failures happen even among experienced and highly trained airline pilots.
Their results indicate that humans may be inherently bad at watching computers work - and we are unlikely to get any better, no matter how careful the selection or training.
"Our study really does suggest that vigilance is a very difficult task for people," said Schooler.
"Extended uninterrupted monitoring can be draining. The antidote to that is interruptions that break up the monotony, but we also found that the interruptions themselves contributed to lapses," said Schooler.
"And people will spontaneously mind-wander, and that can also contribute to monitoring difficulties," he said.
For the study, the researchers asked 16 commercial jet pilots to monitor the progress of a simulated routine flight in which high levels of cockpit automation handled the tasks of navigating and steering the airplane.
The researchers found that the cockpit environment is busy enough that pilots were often sidetracked by other tasks, such as talking to air traffic control or configuring the airplane's systems, which curtailed fatigue.
But they also discovered that these pop-up tasks could cause pilots to miss important events during flight.
Most interesting, Schooler and Casner said, is what happened when the pilots were not interrupted.
Rather than focusing solely on monitoring the flight, they instead created their own distractions by engaging in what the researchers call "mind wandering."
When periodically asked, during the study, what they were thinking about, pilots admitted to thinking "task-unrelated thoughts" up to 50 per cent of the time - mental excursions that frequently led to missed events in flight.
All in all, the researchers found, pilots missed 25 per cent of all altitude crossings they were charged with monitoring.
The pilots tried to limit their mind wandering to times when there were fewer demands on their attention, Schooler said, but ultimately found that even in circumstances with high demand they routinely mind wandered.
"This task of watching over a computer system while it works is incredibly trying, if not impossible, for a human being to do well," Casner said.
"This is a job for a robot, not a human being. It's time to rethink the way we design these systems," he said.
The study was published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.
