Examining Aviation Navigation Display Symbology in Visual Search

This paper investigates properties of air traffic glyphs that may affect speed and accuracy when a navigation display is being searched. Four of these properties were explored: ( a) the amount of information represented, ( b) the number of aircraft displayed, ( c) the amount of information accessed, and ( d) the specific set of features representing the information. Two target detection experiments were conducted to measure speed and accuracy. Findings indicate that, generally, increases in the first three items negatively affect speed and accuracy. Furthermore, graphical features tend to be identified faster and more accurately than text-based features.