Atypical Visual Display for Monitoring Multiple CCTV Feeds

Despite advances in surveillance technologies, security and command and control (C2) centers still rely strongly on human operators to detect critical events. Human factors-such as cognitive workload and limited attentional capacity-have been shown to affect operators' ability to detect critical incidents. The current standard surveillance environment comprises a large screen layout that simultaneously displays multiple camera feeds. Although having access to all sources of information at once seems intuitively appealing, there is ample evidence to suggest that it can, in fact, lead to poor detection performance. We propose a design solution that is based on principles grounded in cognitive psychology and user experience design. One key objective is to test empirically whether an atypical design pattern that is consistent with serial cognitive processes induces better performance than the current standard surveillance environment. Three variations of the alternative display pattern will be tested by comparing their effects on detection performance within a surveillance microworld.