Effective Interventions in Rare Event Inspection

Safe operation and airworthiness of the civil aviation fleet demands reliable inspection, often visual, of structure and components. Inspection involves both spatial and temporal uncertainty. Visual search failure and vigilance decrements are well-documented adverse consequences of spatial and temporal uncertainty. Whereas vigilance studies have typically been conducted over single prolonged session, the task of aircraft component inspection is a multi-session task. It was hypothesized that the vigilance findings from a single prolonged session would be applicable to multi-session tasks. Forty university students were recruited to perform a search task over 10 sessions. The two independent variables were the primary target rate and number of targets types. The probability of primary target detection did not exhibit a signal rate effect, but did show a multiple target effect. The analysis also suggested that the task differed significantly from a traditional vigilance task.

[1]  Joel S. Warm,et al.  The Psychophysics of Vigilance , 1980 .

[2]  R. Parasuraman,et al.  Interaction of signal discriminability and task type in vigilance decrement , 1987, Perception & psychophysics.

[3]  M. Loeb,et al.  The Psychology of Vigilance , 1982 .

[4]  Angus Craig.  Vigilance for Two Kinds of Signal with Unequal Probabilities of Occurrence , 1979 .

[5]  W P Colquhoun,et al.  Practice Effects on a Visual Vigilance Task with and without Search , 1970, Human factors.

[6]  Colin G. Drury,et al.  Task Complexity in Visual Inspection , 1986 .

[7]  A Craig,et al.  Signal Detection Theory and Probability Matching Apply to Vigilance , 1985, Human factors.

[8]  Colin G. Drury,et al.  Human Performance in Sampling Inspection , 1979 .

[9]  C G Drury,et al.  Predicting Search Performance for Multiple Targets , 1980, Human factors.

[10]  Joel S. Warm,et al.  The Effects of Signal Salience and Caffeine on Performance, Workload, and Stress in an Abbreviated Vigilance Task , 2000, Hum. Factors.

[11]  R R Mackie,et al.  Vigilance Research—Are We Ready for Countermeasures? , 1987, Human factors.

[12]  E D Megaw,et al.  Target Uncertainty and Visual Scanning Strategies , 1979, Human factors.

[13]  Yao-Chung Tsao,et al.  Inspectors' Stopping Policy after Fault Detection , 1984 .

[14]  Arousal and Vigilance: Still Vital at Fifty , 1998 .

[15]  A. Craig.  Monitoring for One Kind of Signal in the Presence of Another: The Effects of Signal Mix on Detectability , 1981, Human factors.