Effect of Preview on Digital Pursuit Control Performance

Abstract

The effect of preview on human performance during a digital pursuit control task was analyzed for different preview spans and different characteristics of the reference input. The data from eight subjects revealed that the RMS error performance improved substantially from the case of no preview to that of one preview point, while the use of additional preview points did not result in any further significant performance improvement. The benefit of preview was most clearly established when the reference input was generated by a purely random process as opposed to a first-order autoregressive process (with the parameter α = 0.95). The RMS error increased when the variance of the reference input increased. The error appeared to be normally distributed with a tendency towards a negative bias.