Investigating the effects of experience on human performance in an object-tracking task: a case study of manual rendezvous and docking

Human involvement with the manual control of object-tracking tasks, such as manual rendezvous and docking, can enhance the flexibility of the task. The operator is required to make decisions as precisely as possible when a chase vehicle is approaching the target vehicle. As the level of mental workload is intensively increased, the operator's perception and decision-making with tracking error-correcting purposes should be properly identified in multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs). The two experimental studies in this paper were conducted for object-based selective attention in six DOFs and object-pointing manipulation under the zero resistance circumstance, which were correlated with human performance when a chaser approached a target spacecraft; the effects of experience level on the two important factors are presented herein. The experimental results demonstrated that some performance details between the novice and experienced groups were different in terms of the attentional priority of multiple DOFs and lateral/vertical movement for deviation error correction, which could provide a certain reference for a cognitive–behavioural model and assist the operator in obtaining proper or even optimal decision-making or operating instructions to improve their adaptation to selective attention and object-pointing manipulation, for preventing accidental manipulation and performance degradation.