Flashlight model: Integrating attention distribution and attention resources for pilots’ visual behaviour analysis and performance prediction

Pilot performance is almost the last line of defense in aircraft safety. Recent years have seen a surge in research aimed at utilizing eye-tracking technology to predict pilot performance, enhancing aviation safety margins. A decline in pilot performance is often attributed to either misdirected attention towards irrelevant tasks or inefficient information processing owing to limited attention resources. Previous research has shown that eye-tracking data can effectively capture these issues and provide accurate performance predictions. Nevertheless, the existing studies either focus on attention distribution or attention resources separately, neglecting the complex interactions between them. To address this gap, our study proposes a synthesized Flashlight model-based eye-tracking analysis for pilot performance prediction, integrating the two perspectives. Accordingly, the combined AOI-gaze metrics are proposed to offer a more nuanced analysis of information processing across specific Areas of Interest (AOIs), thereby enhancing the analysis of gaze metrics. We examined the efficacy of the combined AOI-gaze metrics in the Gradient-boosted decision trees(GBDT) model for pilot performance prediction and compared them with other widely used eye-tracking metrics in a simulated flight experiment case study. Moreover, we employed the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method to identify the most influential eye-tracking measurements for pilots’ performance prediction. The result demonstrated that the selected eye-tracking measurements obtained the highest accuracy in performance prediction.