A Review of the Hosman and Van der Vaart Tracking Experiment

One of the first large research projects on human control behavior performed at Delft University of Technology is the work of Hosman and Van der Vaart. In their tracking experiment, Hosman and Van der Vaart investigated the influence of visual and vestibular motion cues on human control behavior in a situation similar to manual control of an aircraft. In these compensatory tracking tasks, subjects were asked to follow or counteract a signal presented on a central (foveal) display. The changes in performance and control behavior were investigated for the addition of peripheral visual and vestibular motion cues. Both disturbance and target following tasks were performed with exactly the same forcing function signal realization. This resulted in a target following and disturbance task which were both thought to be representative for manual control in actual flight, but yielded a significant difference in task difficulty between both types of task. Because of this discrepancy in task difficulty, it is unsure to what extent the differences between the two types of tracking task observed by Hosman and Van der Vaart actually result from their inherent differences, or are caused by the different levels of task difficulty. This paper describes the results of a recent experiment, highly similar to the tracking experiment of Hosman and Van der Vaart, that was performed in the SIMONA Research Simulator at Delft University of Technology. The goal of this experiment was to measure the effect of different visual and vestibular motion cues on control behavior in compensatory target following and disturbance tasks of equal difficulty, thereby allowing for clear comparison of use of motion cues in both types of tasks. The results of this experiment indicate that the main trends in tracking performance and control behavior reported by Hosman and Van der Vaart for their target following and disturbance tasks can still be seen as representative for both types of classical compensatory tracking task.