Partitioning Complexity in Air Traffic Management Tasks

Cognitive complexity is a term that appears frequently in air traffic control research literature, yet there is little principled investigation of the potential sources of cognitive complexity. Three distinctly different sources of cognitive complexity are proposed: environmental, organizational, and display. Two experiments were conducted to explore whether these proposed components of complexity could be effectively partitioned, measured, and compared. The findings demonstrate that sources of complexity can be decomposed and measured and furthermore, the use of color in displays, a display design intervention meant to reduce environmental complexity, can actually contribute to it.

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