Gaze - grabber distance in expert and novice forest machine operators: the effects of automatic boom control

Abstract

Eye-hand coordination is a central skill in both everyday and expert visuo-motor tasks. In forest machine cockpits during harvest, the operators need to perform the eye-hand coordination and spatial navigation effectively to control the boom of the forwarder smoothly and quickly to achieve high performance. Because it is largely unknown how this skill is acquired, we conducted a first eye-tracking study of its kind to uncover the strategies expert and novice operators use. In an authentic training situation, both groups used an industry standard machine with- and without intelligent boom control support, and we measured their gaze and boom control strategies.