Effective Temporal Awareness Support can Hinder Change Detection

AbstractChange blindness (CB) – the failure to notice visual changes – is an important source of human errors in managing dynamic multitasking situations, especially when the tempo at which the situation evolves as well as the timeliness of the decisions are critical to performance and to achieving higher order goals. The support of temporal awareness – in the form of a Temporal Overview Display (TOD) – proved successful in promoting time-based decision heuristics and increasing the timeliness of actions. In the present study, we test the impact on CB of a tool that provides an external time-based representation of the situation and its evolution within an air-warfare simulation that requires participants to perform radar-based subtasks. Although the use of the TOD was previously shown beneficial to performance, the tool may come with a drawback as participants missed a greater number of critical changes compared to a control condition. The TOD is associated with an exacerbation of the attentional source of CB as suggested by a higher percentage of fixated undetected changes. The contextual cues essential to detect a change may not be salient enough to be quickly found in the tool, especially when the operator must deal with time pressure, multitasking and multiple other sources of information. Our study highlights the need for a comprehensive approach to system development and evaluation in order to prevent unintended consequences such as higher CB rates