| Dr Steve Palmisano wearing vision-tracking goggles with a simulated a... Dr Steve Palmisano wearing vision-tracking goggles with a simulated aircraft landing strip in the background |
Psychologist scores a ‘touchdown’ in North America
23 Apr 2008 | Bernie Goldie
Research by a Senior Lecturer in UOW’s School of Psychology, Dr Steve Palmisano, into the role of visual perception during aircraft landings, has been selected for inclusion in a project designed to promote the science of psychology to talented high school students in North America.
This Psychological Science Youth Connection (PSYC) project has a team of top college students working to help the best high school students (statewide and beyond) to better understand psychology's empirical foundation. This is achieved by presenting several key studies which demonstrate both the science and application of Psychology.
One of these ‘key papers’ was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2005 by Dr Palmisano and Professor Barbara Gillam from the University of New South Wales (entitled : ‘Visual perception of touchdown point during simulated landing’).
Dr Palmisano said that during a visually-controlled landing, trainee pilots often have considerable difficulty locating their future touchdown point on the runway and determining whether their glideslope is too low or high.
“While several possible visual aiming/glideslope cues have been proposed, there has been little consensus about which are actually used by pilots during landings,” he said.
In their study Dr Palmisano and Professor Gillam had participants judge the location of their future touchdown point during simulated aircraft landing approaches.
“We found that judgments were unacceptably imprecise and biased for all of the different night landing conditions tested (e.g. when only the runway outline was visible). However, accurate and unbiased judgments were found when the ground plane was visible and covered with a regular grid pattern,” Dr Palmisano said.
The researchers concluded that visual motion cues alone did not appear to be sufficient for a pilot to land an airplane and that the systematic errors associated with these motion cues under sparse conditions might be responsible for the increased likelihood of accidents during night or ‘black hole’ landings.
This UOW aviation research is ongoing and is currently supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to Dr Palmisano and Associate Professor Robert Allison (York University, Canada), entitled ‘Identification and examination of visual cues for aircraft glideslope control’. Other staff and students currently working on this project are Dr Juno Kim (Postdoctoral Fellow, UOW), Rebecca Murray (Masters student, UOW) and April Ash (Honours student, UOW).
Dr Palmisano said his project goals are to identify the most important visual information for aimpoint detection and glideslope control by: (1) measuring the detectability of each visual cue at different distances from the runway; and (2) analysing pilot glideslope errors and gaze records during simulated landings when these cues are varied.
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