UO's New Media Center Adds New Dimension to Aviation Safety Research

By Joyce Winslow (jwins@oregon.uoregon.edu)

In the three short years of its existence, the University of Oregon's New Media Center (NMC) has already garnered numerous awards for its creativity and innovation. Dedicated to breaking new ground in multimedia applications, the NMC regularly attracts faculty and others from both public institutions and private industry who are interested in developing multimedia courseware or research tools.

Most recently, the NMC attracted UO psychology department head Dr. Robert Mauro, who hoped to design an interactive decision-making test for pilots that simulated real-life flight situations. Mauro first approached the NMC in August 1998 and asked the staff if they could devise a system that would work on the Internet, using any browser. Could such an interactive test guarantee the confidentiality of the subjects' responses? Could it measure the time it took each subject to make a decision? Could it record the multiple stages of decision making? The answer to all these questions was yes, and the Internet-based Decision Research System (IDRS) was born.

The technical challenges of Mauro's project appealed to NMC staff members, who are fond of stressing the "New" in "New Media." In the words of technology manager Harold Hersey, "If we're not breaking ground on every new project, we're doing something wrong."

IDRS is definitely breaking new ground, and it has already attracted the attention of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The initial leg of the study, funded by a modest grant from the National Science Foundation, is a demonstration project studying the decision-making processes of airplane pilots during a simulated flight from Eugene to Seattle under changing weather conditions. With NASA's funding, the study will expand to include simulations of other types of real-life situations in which pilots must make decisions. NASA is particularly interested in the data's possible application in improving flight safety and minimizing pilot error, and plans to use the information to develop new training methods for pilots.

The idea behind IDRS began with Dr. Mauro's quest for a better system for for studying real-life decision making. Choosing flight scenarios was a natural for Mauro, who holds a commercial pilot's certificate and is conducting other aviation safety research with NASA and the University Consortium for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).

Recording pilot decisions during simulated flight seemed an ideal departure from traditional methods of studying the decision-making process. For decades, psychologists and other cognitive scientists have conducted decision-making studies in laboratories using college student volunteers. However, researchers have come to realize that people in the real world frequently do not make decisions the way their subjects did in the laboratory. Such questions as "How do people solve problems?" and "How do we encourage good decision-making and discourage bad?" remained largely unanswered because studies relying upon college student volunteers working on artificial problems did not reflect how decisions are made in important real-world situations.

So Mauro and the NMC's technical and graphic design staff set to work designing a whole new environment--one that functionally simulated, as realistically as possible, the environments both on the ground and in the air in which pilots make decisions.

The technical staff (comprising technology manager Harold Hersey, one full-time and one part-time programmer, and two student programmers) was charged with ironing out problems arising from using the World Wide Web as the testing medium. Because pilots would be taking the test using their own desktop computer setups, NMC programmers had to design with a variety of possible computer platforms and browsers in mind. They also had the task of writing a program that could measure, and store online, data on what decisions the subjects made and what information they examined, in what order, and for how long.

Meanwhile, the graphic design staff--design manager Scott Mongrain and four graphic design students--began the painstaking work of constructing a virtual world. Working from photographs of the Eugene airport, detailed flight maps, and actual cockpit instrument panels, the staff labored to create realistic flight scenarios using animation and vector graphics. Vector graphics were favored because, apart from their smaller file sizes and quicker loading time, they also have the advantage of allowing users to "zoom in" for an enlarged view of graphic detail without distorting it, a feature that's particularly useful for viewing the maps that are an important part of these aviation scenarios.

In an effort to make the "test flight" as experiential as possible, audio effects (such as engine hum) and time lapse indicators (such as moving and changing clouds) were also added.

As we go to press, the project has just completed its first phase of testing and is entering the second. During phase one, experts in both aviation and decision-making reviewed the project and submitted their comments, which were then used as a basis for adjusting and refining the test scenarios.

In phase two, a group of flight technology students will be recruited to go through the scenarios while "thinking aloud." The students' comments are recorded, and they are interviewed individually after their "test flight" to determine whether the scenarios distorted their decision-making processes in any way.

The third phase of the project is slated to begin this summer, when, if all goes as planned, the test will be launched on the web. Mauro plans to advertise the project on bulletin boards and aviation organization web pages. He hopes the flight scenarios will be interesting enough for the pilots who see it on the web to participate without further incentives, taking the view that "the biggest motivation for an expert to participate in research is to better the profession."

While the efforts of Mauro and the NMC hold great promise for the future of aviation safety, their work also stands to benefit other areas of research. Interactive online testing has potential uses in a variety of other disciplines, including education, linguistics, and marketing. The sky, one might say, is the limit.