The Use of Color-Coded Symbols in a Highly Dense Situation Display

The effectiveness of redundant color-coding for displays used by highly-loaded operators performing a series of complex tasks has never been clearly demonstrated. Pilot flight performance and threat recognition performance using two coding conditions for a threat display were compared in a simulated mission. One coding condition consisted of shape-coded symbols, the other of symbols that were both color- and shape-coded. Redundant color-coding was found to significantly reduce both response time and error rate.