Traditional visual search versus X-ray image inspection in students and professionals: Are the same visual-cognitive abilities needed?

Abstract

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.