Bayesian modeling of pilot belief and visual misperception in helicopter overland navigation

This paper aims to provide a framework to model human belief and misperception in helicopter overland navigation. Helicopter overland navigation is known to be a challenging cognitive task, and understanding the cognitive processes associated with it is non-trivial. Twelve military personnel participated in the study and statistical analysis showed that their gaze parameters can be predicted by their level of expertise. Some pilots showed common visual misperception during the navigation task, which can be explained by the following errors: 1) confusion between inference and evidence, 2) incorrect mutually exclusive assumptions on the data, and 3) biased sampling. Simulation results on two cases observed in the experiments are given. Quantitative differences in dynamic perceptions between a Bayesian agent and misperceiving humans are presented with the suggested modeling framework.