Putting Information in the Visual Periphery: It Beats a Pointed Stick in the Eye
The Increasing complexity of systems has placed great pressure on the system designer to provide effective and efficient means for communicating system and subsystem status information to the operator. The conventional means of providing this feedback ultimately require displays beyond those required for momentary control of the system, increasing the amount of visual information that must be processed and usually increasing the amount of instrumentation present. It may be possible to integrate these secondary sources of Information within the context of a single display that Is proximal to primary system displays and has strong spatial pattern characteristics. Three formats of such a “peripheral” display were examined in the context of a simulated instrument flight task. The “figural” displays appeared to provide a slight edge in performance over a histogram-based display.