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

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...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2014, Vol.9 (1), p.e86157-e86157
Main Authors: Näsholm, Erika, Rohlfing, Sarah, Sauer, James D
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Amnesia
Attention
Attention - physiology
Blindness
Boundary conditions
Closed circuit television
Cognition & reasoning
Criminal investigations
Descriptions
Error detection
Eye movements
Female
Human factors
Humans
Male
Medicine
Monitoring
Neurosciences
Operators
Perceptions
Photic Stimulation
Pirate
Professional Competence
Public Opinion
Real time
Security
Security Measures
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Stimuli
Surveillance
Television
Vision, Ocular - physiology
Visual task performance
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0086157