Managing Critical Events in a Multimodal Watchstation

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Abstract
Change Blindness refers to the phenomena that humans are often unable to detect major changes in objects from one scene to the next. Future Naval Consoles, such as the Multimodal Watchstation (MMWS), will provide large, physically dispersed, screen areas that will require operators to shift their attention from one display to another - a departure from current “single task/single display” command and control consoles. This diversion of attention creates an opportunity for changes to be made to unattended screens. The result is that watchstanders may suffer from change blindness with potentially disastrous consequences. This paper presents data on the occurrence of change blindness in a tactical scenario. On a sparse tactical display comprised of only 8 contacts of interest, observers demonstrated a considerable degree of change blindness. These changes were task relevant and critical to the operator's situational awareness and task of monitoring the air space. For 27% of the critical changes tested, the observers were unsure as to what contact had actually changed on the display since it took them 2 or more mouse clicks to correctly identify the contact. On 16.5% of the trails, observers grossly guessed at what change took place. Thus, change blindness occurs in the CIC environment.

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