How is the tape display poor or inferior?
Dozy, Dozy, Dozy,
That Grether study is almost completely useless to this discussion - because the way the subjects were assessing the dials/tapes is completely different to how a pilot uses his airspeed display.
Given that Grether was measuring how accurately the person could read the instrument, and how quickly, I imagine that the method was to simply flash an instrument in front of a subject, and then time how long it took him to discern the value - then record how accurate his readings were.
So what the subjects were doing was very, very, very different to what a pilot's brain is doing when using instruments to fly an aircraft.
And to really underline this difference, look at the scores for instrument 'I', which is just a purely digital reading. According to the scores, this form of presentation is the best of all!
But if you seriously tried to give pilots just a purely digital value (instrument 'I') for airspeed you would be laughed out of town!
That instrument 'I' scored so well shows that this test is not at all relevant to pilots and aircraft instruments.
To properly test tapes vs dials - as used by pilots - you would have to use a flight simulator, with the pilot trying to accurately fly the virtual aircraft. The pilot would also have to be in a high workload, high stress situation.
Do this with two simulators - one with tape for airspeed, the other with dials, then look at how accurately the aircraft was flown.
From that study you linked to earlier, it sounds like testing along these lines has already been done. Here are the relevant quotes:
Testing in a Link simulator found the tape display to be workable, but pointers resulted in a superior flight performance. Further experimentation with expanded scales and more training was recommended (Mengelkoch & Houston, 1958).
and:
A reminder that tape displays are also not optimum when a pointer can cover the required range was seen in testing of several formats for an F-16 vertical velocity indicator (Cone & Hassoun, 1991).
and:
An indication of the limitations of tape displays in dynamic flight environments is seen in the midseventies when the USAF moved away from tape displays for heads down primary flight displays
It seems that you, and a few others on this thread don't like these quotes, but I believe we should be attaching considerable weight to them, as they relate specifically to how pilots use instruments when flying.
... this satisfies the "proximity" perception as well, ...
Dozy, I think you misunderstand what "proximity compatibility" is. The "proximity" is not so much about physical separation, but more about "similarity". See the following:
"The Proximity Compatibility Principle: Its Psychological Foundation and Relevance to Display Design" by Wickens, Christopher D.; Carswell, C. Melody - Human Factors, Vol. 37, Issue 3, September 1995 | Questia, Your Online Research Library
Human?computer interaction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
You may prefer the old gauges, but to say they're objectively "better" is incorrect.
This is a stunning statement, in light of what that list of quotes had to say. I think you need to have another read, slowly and properly, of all those quotes. That post here:
http://www.pprune.org/8607329-post1043.html
... it's intellectually dishonest to state that your preference is fundamentally better with no significant proof.
Dozy, Dozy, Dozy. That list of quotes contains some very significant proof. Making it more significant is the absence of anything saying that tapes are superior. You and some others seem to have blinkers on when it comes to the message carried by those quotes.