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Nasholm Rohlfing Sauer 2014 PLOS One.pdf (144.88 kB)

Pirate stealth or inattentional blindness? The effects of target relevance and sustained attention on security monitoring for experienced and naïve operators

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posted on 2023-05-18, 04:34 authored by Nasholm, E, Rohlfing, S, James SauerJames Sauer
Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) operators are responsible for maintaining security in various applied settings. However, research has largely ignored human factors that may contribute to CCTV operator error. One important source of error is inattentional blindness – the failure to detect unexpected but clearly visible stimuli when attending to a scene. We compared inattentional blindness rates for experienced (84 infantry personnel) and naïve (87 civilians) operators in a CCTV monitoring task. The task-relevance of the unexpected stimulus and the length of the monitoring period were manipulated between participants. Inattentional blindness rates were measured using typical post-event questionnaires, and participants' real-time descriptions of the monitored event. Based on the post-event measure, 66% of the participants failed to detect salient, ongoing stimuli appearing in the spatial field of their attentional focus. The unexpected task-irrelevant stimulus was significantly more likely to go undetected (79%) than the unexpected task-relevant stimulus (55%). Prior task experience did not inoculate operators against inattentional blindness effects. Participants' real-time descriptions revealed similar patterns, ruling out inattentional amnesia accounts.

History

Publication title

PL o S One

Volume

9

Article number

e86157

Number

e86157

Pagination

1-8

ISSN

1932-6203

Department/School

School of Psychological Sciences

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Place of publication

United States

Rights statement

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Expanding knowledge in psychology

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