The Effects of Binaural Auditory Modality on Operators in A Flight Simulation Task

The thesis describes a within-group study on the effect of dichotic listening on participants' reaction time, situation awareness and workload. 21 participants are subjected to two flight simulation trials, in which they are engaged in the primary tasks regarding basic flight operations, meanwhile, they are required to change the altitude and heading by instructions from the Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs), they also have to respond to TCAS warning which may activate at any time. Other distractions in the scenarios includes the checklist procedures conducted by the other ‘pilot’ and the simulated cockpit background noise. During the trials, two auditory cues conditions are compared (monaural and binaural). Their performance are recorded in the form of videos for the following analysis. After each trial, each participant is required to complete the SART and NASA-TLX self-rating techniques by the perception based on the experience. The results (n=21) indicate the statistically significant differences between the two auditory modalities in reaction time, situation awareness and workload.