Experimental investigation between attentional-resource effectiveness and perception and diagnosis in nuclear power plants

Eye-tracking-based measures of attentional-resource effectiveness in information searching such as FIR (fixation to importance ratio) and SAE (selective attention effectiveness) have been developed based on cost-benefit principles. The relationship between the eye-tracking-based measures and perception and diagnosis of operators during operating tasks in main control rooms (MCRs) of nuclear power plants (NPPs) is investigated with experimental studies. The FIR and the SAE, which represent how effectively an operator attends to important information sources, are used as measures of the effectiveness in information searching. Perception failure rate (PFR) and diagnosis score (DS) are used as measures of perception and diagnosis, respectively. Experimental results show that the FIR and the SAE correlate closely with the PFR and the DS, respectively. It is concluded that the FIR and the SAE can be used as inferential measures of perception and diagnosis for human factors in NPP MCRs.