Illustrative adaptive flight deck and workload index. Watch the instruments reorganise, acknowledge the weather advisory or switch radar layers.
Signals. Context. Adaptation.
CrossFeed
Physiological Signals for Adaptive Flight Decks
When the person changes,
what should the interface do?
Explore an adaptive flight deck as illustrative workload rises: alarms and navigation expand while secondary detail recedes. Acknowledge the alert and switch radar layers.
THE IDEARead the demand.
Read the demand.
Rethink the interface.
CrossFeed is a research concept for adapting a flight-deck interface to the person and the tasks competing for their attention.
Saccades, fixations, pupillometry, skin conductance and heart-rate variability would contribute to estimates of visual attention, situation awareness and workload. An orchestrator would combine these estimates with task context and Wickens’ Multiple Resource Theory to consider where resource conflict and task interference might be reduced.
THE ENVIRONMENTA flight deck that can
A flight deck that can
change its presentation.
A proposed simulation environment would time-align physiological recordings with task events, flight-deck interactions and the interface changes made by the orchestrator. Individual baselines, signal quality and uncertainty would remain visible in the estimation process.
Candidate adaptations include reducing secondary detail, changing cue modality and adjusting when secondary information appears. The representative flight deck resizes and reorganises weather, advisories and navigation as an illustrative workload index changes, while keeping primary flight instruments in place.
Physiological signals
Combine eye-movement features and pupil measures with skin conductance and HRV, retaining timing, validity and baseline information.
Resource-aware orchestration
Use Wickens’ Multiple Resource Theory to represent task demands and reason about potential resource overlap and interference.
Adaptive presentation
Compare changes in detail, timing and modality, with an inspectable rationale and a way for the operator to retain or restore the layout.
RESEARCH VARIABLESDoes the adaptation
Does the adaptation
help the person?
Evaluate state estimates and interface changes separately, then study how they work together during concurrent flight-deck tasks.
THE QUESTION
An estimate needs a reference.
Relate physiological and eye-movement features to task context, participant baselines and independent measures. Situation awareness should be evaluated with task-specific probes and performance evidence, rather than inferred from a single physiological signal.
- What changes
- Signal combinations, individual baselines and task demand
- What we observe
- Estimate uncertainty, gaze allocation, workload reports, situation-awareness probes and task performance
Which combinations remain informative across people and changing task conditions?
Keep the whole
feedback loop inspectable.
Signal and context
Preserve physiological samples, eye-movement events, quality indicators and aligned task events.
Decision and response
Record the resource-conflict estimate, uncertainty, proposed adaptation and operator response.
Independent evaluation
Use task performance, participant reports and situation-awareness probes to evaluate whether an adaptation is helpful.
Research concept. The flight deck uses illustrative values and scripted interface adaptations; it does not present participant recordings or validated research results.
Theoretical basis: Wickens (2008), Multiple Resources and Mental Workload
The interface is
part of the task.
CrossFeed asks how physiology, task theory and human control can guide a flight deck that responds to changing demands.
Talk to the lab Next project: Behaviours Analysis Studio