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International audience; There has been a considerable amount of research to conceptualize how cognition handle multitasking situations. Despite these efforts, it is still not clear how task parameters shape attentionnal resources allocation. For instance, many research have suggested that difficulty levels could explain these conflicting observations and very few have considered other factors such as task importance. In the present study, twenty participants had to carry out two N-Back tasks simultaneously, each subtask having distinct difficulty (0,1 or 2-Back) and importance (1 or 3 points) levels. Participants's cumulative dwell time were collected to assess their attentional strategies. Results showed that depending on the global level of difficulty (combination of the two levels of difficulty), attentional resources of people were driven either by the subtask difficulty (under low-global-difficulty) or the subtask importance (under high-global-difficulty), in a non-compensatory way. We discussed these results in terms of decision-making heuristics and metacognition.

International audience; Previous research has suggested that information and action automation stages do not imply the same consequences for human performance in the supervision of automated systems. Still, only a few studies have simultaneously investigated these stages. When information and action automation are reliable, both can support performance. However, with unreliable aids, the literature has suggested that action automation tends to be more detrimental than information automation. This study aimed to assess the contributions of imperfect information and action automation on attentional allocation and to investigate a potential monitoring inefficiency in a multitasking environment. Participants (n = 96) completed three Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MATB) tasks. A monitoring task was automated with two types of automation (action or information) of four reliabilities each (0%; 56.25%; 87.5%; 100%). Ocular behaviors and performance were assessed. Results show that reliability of information automation influenced visual resource allocation. When information automation was the most reliable, participants spent the least amount of time sampling the monitoring task. Finally, the reliability of action automation triggered no effect on performance or cumulative dwell times. Our results suggest that in complex multitasking situations where information and action automation occurred simultaneously, participants allocated fewer visual resources to automated task with increased information automation reliability. Similarly, their performance was better only with increased information automation.

International audience; OpenMATB is an open-source variant of the Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MATB) and is available under a free software license. MATB consists of a set of tasks representative of those performed in aircraft piloting. It is used, in particular, to study the effect of automation on decision-making, mental workload, and vigilance. Since the publication of MATB 20 years ago, the subject of automation has grown considerably in importance. After introducing the task battery, this article highlights three main requirements for an up-to-date implementation of MATB. First, there is a need for task customization, to make it possible to change the values, appearance or integrated components (such as rating scales) of the tasks. Second, researchers need software extensibility to enable them to integrate specific features, such as synchronization with psychophysiological devices. Third, to achieve experiment replicability, it is necessary that the source code and the scenario files are easily available and auditable. In the present paper, we explain how these aspects are implemented in OpenMATB by presenting the software architecture and features, while placing special emphasis on the crucial role of the plugin system and the simplicity of the format used in the script files. Finally, we present a number of general trends for the future study of automation in human factors research and ergonomics.

The present study aims to further investigate the prioritization process that sustains executive control in complex multitasking. It intends to provide a description of task-attributes processing, in which several of these attributes present opposite polarities. The general aim of this work is to propose a heuristic decision-making account of prioritization.

ISBN 978-3-319-92284-3 (print), 978-3-319-92285-0 (online); International audience; Automated systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in our environment. This leads to a new tasks repartition between the human operator and automation. Understanding human-machine cooperation including potential failures has become a hot topic. In this study we focus on a possible negative consequence of automation: the complacency phenomenon. This phenomenon has been repeatedly observed in dynamic situations in which automation execute an action in order to relieve the human operator from his/her activity. In static task, automation often serves to simplify/pre-process the data and not to directly make a decision. The goal of automation in a static task (like planning) is to optimize an external representation and allow the human operator to make his choices more easily. The Eye Tracker is used to understand human behaviors and their strategies in these static situations. The purpose of this study is therefore to compare complacency to "action execution" from complacency to "data simplifica-tion". We confronted 96 participants to these two automation types on the Multi Attribute Task Battery. We also manipulated four levels of automation reliability (0%; 56.25%; 87.5%, 100%). In all these conditions we assessed complacency through the detection rate of automation failure. In addition, we used an eye tracker to assess a potential low level of suspicion regarding automation failure.

Sonification refers to systems that convey information into the non-speech audio modality [1] . This technique has been largely invested in developing guidance systems for visually impaired individuals. In 2008, more than 140 systems of this type used in various application areas were referenced [2] . In aeronautics, such a system –namely the Sound Flyer– is currently used by visually impaired pilots in real flight context to control the aircraft attitude. However, it is unclear if this system would be acceptable for sighted individuals. Indeed, early visual deprivation leads to compensatory mechanisms which often result in better auditory attentional skills [7] , [8] . In the present study we assessed this issue. Two groups of pilots (blind vs. sighted) took part in a flight simulator experiment. They were all blindfolded to avoid potential visual information acquisition (i.e. some blind individuals had residual visual capacities). Participants had to perform successive aircraft maneuvers on the sole basis of auditory information provided by the sound flyer. Maneuvers difficulty varied with the number of parameters to apply: easy (none), medium (one: pitch or bank) or hard (two: pitch and bank). The Sound Flyer generated a pure tone (53 dB SPL) modulated as a function of pitch (tonal variation) and bank (inter-aural and rhythmic variations). We assessed flight performance along with subjective (NASA-TLX) and neurological (irrelevant auditory-probe technique; [9] ) measures of cognitive workload. We hypothesized that the automatic cerebral reaction to deviant auditory stimuli (10% “ti” among 90% “ta”; 56db SPL) would be affected by the difficulty [10] , [11] and participants’ auditory attention. Preliminary data analyses revealed that blind and sighted participants reached target-attitudes with good accuracy (mean error of 2.04°). Globally, subjective cognitive workload and brain responses to the auditory probe were influenced by the difficulty of the maneuver but not by the visual impairment. These initial results provide evidence that auditory displays are effective, not only for maintaining straight and level flight [6] , but also for attaining precise aircraft attitudes. Results also suggest that flight maneuvers should remain quite simple to avoid too high cognitive workload. In other words, attitude sonification can provide robust information and, along with Brungart and Simpson [3] specifications, could contribute to the fight against spatial disorientation in the cockpit.

International audience; In the aeronautics field, some authors have suggested that an aircraft's attitude sonification could be used by pilots to cope with spatial disorientation situations. Such a system is currently used by blind pilots to control the attitude of their aircraft. However, given the suspected higher auditory attentional capacities of blind people, the possibility for sighted individuals to use this system remains an open question. For example, its introduction may overload the auditory channel, which may in turn alter the responsiveness of pilots to infrequent but critical auditory warnings. In this study, two groups of pilots (blind versus sighted) performed a simulated flight experiment consisting of successive aircraft maneuvers, on the sole basis of an aircraft sonification. Maneuver difficulty was varied while we assessed flight performance along with subjective and electroencephalographic (EEG) measures of workload. The results showed that both groups of participants reached target-attitudes with a good accuracy. However, more complex maneuvers increased subjective workload and impaired brain responsiveness toward unexpected auditory stimuli as demonstrated by lower N1 and P3 amplitudes. Despite that the EEG signal showed a clear reorganization of the brain in the blind participants (higher alpha power), the brain responsiveness to unexpected auditory stimuli was not significantly different between the two groups. The results suggest that an auditory display might provide useful additional information to spatially disoriented pilots with normal vision. However, its use should be restricted to critical situations and simple recovery or guidance maneuvers.

Commonly defined as “task-unrelated thoughts”, the mind wandering (MW) state is one of the causes of inattention to on-going tasks. Such a concept includes various kinds of thoughts from unaware ones to emotional/ruminative or distractive ones (i.e. all thoughts unrelated to an emotional state). Some researchers have investigated emotional ruminative thoughts in the daily driving context and found an indisputable impact on the focus of attention on the driving scene. Although more frequent in driving situations, no study has focused on distractive thoughts. The aim of this paper is to determine how this kind of task-unrelated thought impacts driving behavior. To induce distractive thoughts, participants were instructed to encode picture/word (retrospective thoughts) and picture/intention (prospective thoughts) pairs during a distractive thought induction phase. Then, in the simulated driving phase, encoded pictures were presented on highway road signs, and served as cues of recall. Drivers had to recall either the word or the intention associated with the picture as soon as they saw it, requiring self-activation of thoughts by participants. Distractive thoughts led to less micro-regulation of both speed and lateral position and narrowed visual scanning of the driving scene. Participants also declared that it increased their mental workload. Theoretical and methodological aspects of the study were discussed regarding the literature on mind-wandering and distraction in driving.