Attentional tunneling and the head-up display

Twenty instrument-rated flight students flew simulated landing approaches to a realistic graphics generated airport, using either a head-up display (HUD) of instrument landing systems (ILS) instruments or the same display positioned 8.5 deg. head down. Responses to discrete events appearing either on the ground environment or on the instrument display assessed the pilot's ability to switch attention between these domains. Unexpected events also occurred once (per subject) in each domain. The results revealed that flight path control and attention switching to the instrumnet display was better supported by the HUD, while this advantage disappeared for attention switching to the environment, and for detection of unexpected events. The results are discussed in terms of the attention strategies employed in sampling multiple information sources.