Date of Award

8-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Aeronautics

First Advisor

Meredith Carroll

Second Advisor

John E. Deaton

Third Advisor

Brandon May

Fourth Advisor

Rian Mehta

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effect of coding types (i.e., alphanumeric coding, color-coding, and redundant color + alphanumeric coding) for vehicle identification and status information on pilots’ recognition performance, situational awareness (SA), and workload for a multi-vehicle operations ground control station (GCS) supervisory control task. With the aviation industry's push towards operators supervising and controlling multiple vehicles, it is pertinent to identify design features that support the capabilities and limitations of human operators. The current study employed a within-subjects, repeated-measures experimental design, in which a sample of 33 students with aviation experience performed three trials, consisting of monitoring three UAVs and responding to queries regarding the unfolding scenario for each coding type. A repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) yielded a significant effect of coding type on SA and workload. Further analysis revealed that color-coding significantly increased SA, regardless of whether alphanumeric identifiers were present, whereas workload was significantly reduced when color-coding was paired with alphanumeric identifiers. These results are consistent with the dual coding theory (Paivio, 1971) and prior research examining the effect of color-coding on SA and workload.

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