Multimethods approach to safety parameter display evaluation

The purpose of this study was to determine which of two orthogonal display evaluation methods could best differentiate (on the basis of objective performance measures) between three unique safety parameter display formats. Another objective was to quantitatively measure the degree to which a tachistoscopic method of evaluation would correlate with the results of a multidimensional rating approach to display evaluation. A sample of test subjects who are qualified test reactor operators were used for a collection of data under experimental detection and recognition paradigms. The same test subjects (N = 5) also rated the quality and quantity of the data from three different safety parameter display formats by using a multidimensional rating scale (MDRS) consisting of seven dimensions. Results indicate the MDRS can be used to predict detection scores, since the results of the tachistoscopic method significantly correlated with three of the seven MDRS dimensions.