Dan Morrow
For something as complex as an aircraft instrument panel, the method many general aviation pilots use to process flight information for their instruments seems decidedly low-tech.
As air traffic controllers feed them information on course heading, altitude, and other flight data, pilots write the numbers down on a notepad. The notepads are such an integral part of flying for many pilots that human factors researcher and Beckman faculty member Dan Morrow realized he had to include them in his laboratory experiments testing cognitive aging and pilot expertise.
"I had done several studies without note taking and pilots said 'you realize of course that you're not letting me do what I'm trained to do,'" Morrow said.
The pilots had been trained to take notes while receiving air traffic control information, and then use the notes to repeat the controllers' instructions back to them and for programming the data into their instruments. In testing pilots, Morrow wanted to make the lab experiment even more difficult than what pilots experienced in their cockpits. But the test subjects' complaints made him rethink the experiment parameters.
"It got me to thinking 'I'm looking at expertise and the extent to which expertise reduces age differences. Well if part of expertise is the ability to use external aids proficiently, then I'm not looking at all the different facets of expertise,'" Morrow said.
So Morrow, an associate professor in the Human Factors Division at the University of Illinois' Institute of Aviation, began designing experiments that included notepads. Morrow said the notepads are what is called an external aid, and can serve as an external form of working memory. He has recently expanded his research toward building a better notepad.
Morrow has devised and is testing an electronic notepad for pilots called an e-pad. Previous testing has shown that pilots using notepads, which are usually held in place on a velcro-bound kneepad, looked down to take notes or read them back, meaning they weren't looking out the window or at their instruments. While useful, Morrow said the notepads could have a cost in overall task management.
The current version of the e-pad is stationary and located next to the instrument panel on a monitor, close to the cockpit window. Morrow said that during flight a pilot's perceptual motor attention is mostly focused on the yoke and scanning the instruments.
"If you've got a more integrated e-pad, you can do the communication tasks with less interference from the scanning of the instruments compared to the notepad," he said.
The e-pad has a touch screen, with three buttons that move up or down to record flight information. Morrow said the e-pad could serve the purpose of adding an external memory aid without the disadvantages of a notepad.
"They both are, hopefully, convenient forms of external memory," he said. "The advantage I'm hoping to have with the e-pad, because of where it's placed, is it doesn't have the attention limitations."
How pilots interact with their environment and communicate is at the heart of Morrow's research into cognitive aging and expertise. The e-pad study is part of a broader research line into external aids for maintaining pilot performance in tasks such communication, comprehension, and decision-making.
"That's part of what we're working on - to come up with external aids for communication that will be consistent with older pilots' expertise and not work against what we know is compromised by general aging," Morrow said.
Morrow, a member of the Human Perception and Performance group at Beckman, said the normal aging process brings about cognitive decline in working memory, slower processing speed, and other factors that complicate the task of listening and understanding.
"We also know that true for pilots," Morrow said. "Older pilots look like everybody else in terms of how they perform on standard working memory tests, for example."
When Morrow first designed his experiments, he had pilots of all ages listen to air traffic control instructions and repeat them back, without benefit of taking notes.