2019-09-10, Merks, Sarah, Hättenschwiler, Nicole, Sterchi, Yanik, Schwaninger, Adrian

Visual search has been studied extensively over decades and has many real-world applications. Research shows that specific visual-cognitive abilities are needed to efficiently and effectively locate a target among distractors. It is, however, not clear whether the results from traditional, simplified visual search tasks conducted by students will extrapolate to an applied inspection task, i.e. X-ray image inspection in airport security. In this study, we tested whether the same visual-cognitive abilities can predict performance in both a traditional visual search task and an X-ray image inspection task in students and professionals. Results showed that even though both tasks require aspects of the same visual-cognitive abilities, the overlap between the tasks was small. Furthermore, although our tested populations were comparable in terms of required visual-cognitive abilities, professionals outperformed students in the X-ray image inspection task. This suggests that visual inspection is not solely predictable by visual-cognitive abilities.

2018-10-04, Sterchi, Yanik, Hättenschwiler, Nicole, Mendes, Marcia, Hügli, David, Merks, Sarah, Schwaninger, Adrian

2017-09-25, Sterchi, Yanik, Hättenschwiler, Nicole, Michel, Stefan, Schwaninger, Adrian

2019-09-10, Sterchi, Yanik, Hättenschwiler, Nicole, Schwaninger, Adrian

Researchers often use the detection measures d' and A' to analyze detection performance in X-ray image inspection task. We investigated whether detection measures (d', A', and da) are truly independent of response tendency. In a first experiment, response tendency was manipulated directly through instruction and resulted in a decrease of d' and A', whereas da with a slope parameter of 0.6 remained constant. Eye-tracking data indicated that manipulating response tendency affected the decision component of the inspection task rather than search errors. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves based on confidence ratings from a second experiment also supported da. Consistent with previous findings, our results imply that d' and A' are not always valid measures of detection performance in X-ray image inspection. We recommend calculating da with a slope parameter of 0.5 in addition to d' to avoid wrong conclusions if ROC curves are not available.

2018-07, Schwaninger, Adrian, Merks, Sarah, Hättenschwiler, Nicole, Sterchi, Yanik, Mendes, Marcia, Hügli, David

2018-10-15, Schwaninger, Adrian, Hättenschwiler, Nicole, Sterchi, Yanik, Mendes, Marcia, Hügli, David, Merks, Sarah

2018-06, Merks, Sarah, Schwaninger, Adrian, Hättenschwiler, Nicole, Sterchi, Yanik, Mendes, Marcia, Hügli, David