Identification and orientation patterns relative to the type of information provided, and the accuracy of alerts: an operational use case with infantry ground military operators

With the increased use of unmanned aerial and ground systems in the military environment, the question of what information to distribute to ground military operators arises. Generally, ground operators prefer ground views over aerial ones. Aerial views can generate broader understanding of the environment and increase comprehension of the situation but, also, cause overload and confusion. Alert systems can push information to operators to increase attending to critical events. But alerts are not perfect; accuracy depends on the rate of misses and false alerts of irrelevant events. In an experimental setup, we examined how information sources (with or without aerial view) and alert accuracy interact to affect ground operators’ performance in an Intelligence gathering identification and orientation mission. We collected performance, subjective and eye-tracking data and present here the ground operators’ sensitivity and response bias using signal detection theory (SDT) measures. Participants performed better with ground views, and we report an interaction between the presence of aerial view and the accuracy of the alerting system for the orientation task. Participants benefited more from alerts with ground views alone.