Applying psychological science to the CCTV review process: a review of cognitive and ergonomic literature

As CCTV cameras are used more and more often to increase security in communities, police are spending a larger proportion of their resources, including time, in processing CCTV images when investigating crimes that have occurred (Levesley & Martin, 2005; Nichols, 2001). As with all tasks, there are ways to approach this task that will facilitate performance and other approaches that will degrade performance, either by increasing errors or by unnecessarily prolonging the process. A clearer understanding of psychological factors influencing the effectiveness of footage review will facilitate future training in best practice with respect to the review of CCTV footage. The goal of this report is to provide such understanding by reviewing research on footage review, research on related tasks that require similar skills, and experimental laboratory research about the cognitive skills underpinning the task. The report is organised to address five challenges to effectiveness of CCTV review: the effects of the degraded nature of CCTV footage, distractions and interrupts, the length of the task, inappropriate mindset, and variability in people’s abilities and experience. Recommendations for optimising CCTV footage review include (1) doing a cognitive task analysis to increase understanding of the ways in which performance might be limited, (2) exploiting technology advances to maximise the perceptual quality of the footage (3) training people to improve the flexibility of their mindset as they perceive and interpret the images seen, (4) monitoring performance either on an ongoing basis, by using psychophysiological measures of alertness, or periodically, by testing screeners’ ability to find evidence in footage developed for such testing, and (5) evaluating the relevance of possible selection tests to screen effective from ineffective screener

Best Practices for Evaluating Flight Deck Interfaces for Transport Category Aircraft with Particular Relevance to Issues of Attention, Awareness, and Understanding CAST SE-210 Output 2 Report 6 of 6

Attention, awareness, and understanding of the flight crew are a critical contributor to safety and the flight deck plays a critical role in supporting these cognitive functions. Changes to the flight deck need to be evaluated for whether the changed device provides adequate support for these functions. This report describes a set of diverse evaluation methods. The report recommends designing the interface-evaluation to span the phases of the device development, from early to late, and it provides methods appropriate at each phase. It describes the various ways in which an interface or interface component can fail to support awareness as potential issues to be assessed in evaluation. It summarizes appropriate methods to evaluate different issues concerning inadequate support for these functions, throughout the phases of development

Supporting dynamic change detection: using the right tool for the task

Detecting task-relevant changes in a visual scene is necessary for successfully monitoring and managing dynamic command and control situations. Change blindness—the failure to notice visual changes—is an important source of human error. Change History EXplicit (CHEX) is a tool developed to aid change detection and maintain situation awareness; and in the current study we test the generality of its ability to facilitate the detection of changes when this subtask is embedded within a broader dynamic decision-making task. A multitasking air-warfare simulation required participants to perform radar-based subtasks, for which change detection was a necessary aspect of the higher-order goal of protecting one’s own ship. In this task, however, CHEX rendered the operator even more vulnerable to attentional failures in change detection and increased perceived workload. Such support was only effective when participants performed a change detection task without concurrent subtasks. Results are interpreted in terms of the NSEEV model of attention behavior (Steelman, McCarley, & Wickens, Hum. Factors 53:142–153, 2011; J. Exp. Psychol. Appl. 19:403–419, 2013), and suggest that decision aids for use in multitasking contexts must be designed to fit within the available workload capacity of the user so that they may truly augment cognition

Change Blindness in Web Applications

Design practitioners have long believed that web interfaces are at a disadvantage compared to desktop interfaces because the web page model may cause change blindness more than non-page based interfaces. To evaluate this concern, a within-subjects experiment was set up to test various change types in a mock web application. User performance was better when a page loaded as normal and when elements changed instantly on screen compared to a half-second flicker change type. However, change detection rates were only 5% greater and response times only 0.1 second faster for the instant change compared to page loading. This shows that there is some change blindness effect due to the Web's page-by-page architecture, but it is not nearly as disconcerting as practitioners have long believed. Furthermore, single page applications that minimize full-page refreshes may help reduce the incidence of change blindness on the web.Master of Science in Information Scienc

Virtual Reality Environment for Studying Change Blindness

Muutusepimedus on intuitsioonivastane fenomen, mis kirjeldab võimetust märgata muutusi ümbritsevas keskkonnas. Muutusepimeduse uurimiseks on kasutusel erinevaid meetodeid. Kuigi virtuaalreaalsuses läbiviidavatel katsetel on mitmeid eeliseid võrreldes tavaliste meetoditega, on virtuaalreaalsuses läbi viidud vaid üksikuid uuringuid. Antud lõputöö eesmärgiks on arendada tööriistakast, mis võimaldab katseid ettevalmistada, taasluua ja virtuaalreaalsuses läbi viia. Tööriistakasti abil saab disainida ruume, lisades uusi esemeid, muuta nende asukohta ning välimust. Lisaks eelnevale saab ka koostada ja läbi viia isikupärastatud katseid.Change blindness is a counterintuitive phenomenon which describes the inability to detect changes in the surrounding world. Change blindness is studied by using various methods. However, so far there are only a few studies in virtual reality environments. This is the case despite the fact that studies done in virtual reality have advantages over conventional means of doing experiments. The aim of the present thesis is to develop a toolbox that allows one to easily prepare, reproduce and carry out change blindness experiments in virtual reality. For this, toolbox enables to design levels by modifying objects’ position, appearance and adding new ones. Also personalised experiments can be created and executed

Assisting Interruption Recovery in Mission Control Operations

Frequent interruptions are commonplace in modern work environments. The negative impacts of interruptions are well documented and include increased task completion and error rates in individual task activities, as well as interference with team coordination in team-based activities. The ramifications of an interruption in mission control operations, such as military command and control and emergency response, can be particularly costly due to the time and life-critical nature of these operations. The negative impacts of interruptions have motivated recent developments in software tools, called interruption recovery tools, which help mitigate the effects of interruptions in a variety of task environments. However, mission control operations introduce particular challenges for the design of these tools due to the dynamic and highly collaborative nature of these environments. To address this issue, this report investigates methods of reducing the negative consequences of interruptions in complex, mission control operations. In particular, this report focuses on supporting interruption recovery for team supervisors in these environments, as the research has shown that supervisors are particularly susceptible to frequent interruptions. Based on the results of a requirements analysis, which involved a cognitive task analysis of a representative mission control task scenario, a new interruption recovery tool, named the Interruption Recovery Assistance (IRA) tool, was developed. In particular, the IRA tool was designed to support a military mission commander overseeing a team of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operators performing ground force protection operations. The IRA tool provides the mission commander a visual summary of mission changes, in the form of an event bookmark timeline. It also provides interactive capabilities to enable the commander to view additional information on the primary task displays when further detail about a particular mission event is needed. The report also presents the findings from a user study that was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the IRA tool on interruption recovery during collaborative UAV mission operations. The study produced mixed results regarding the effectiveness of the IRA tool. The statistical analysis indicated a negative impact on recovery time, while indicating a positive impact on decision accuracy, especially in complex task situations. The study also indicated that the effect of the IRA tool varied across differ user populations. In particular, the IRA tool tended to provide greater benefits to participants without military experience, compared to military participants involved in the study. The qualitative findings from the study provided key insights into the impact and utility of the IRA tool. These insights were used to identify several future research and design directions related to interruption recovery in mission control operations.Prepared for Boeing Phantom Work

Relevance ratings and salience categorizations for objects in a set of 80 pictures

In this study, we provide normative data for objects in a set of 80 digital color pictures (e.g., nature scenes, human activities, cartoon characters, magazine covers). In Experiment 1, four objects in each picture were rated by 48 observers on a 6-point Likert scale for their relevance to the overall meaning of the scene. In Experiment 2, Salience Toolbox software (Walther & Koch, 2006) provided additional information about whether the four relevance-rated objects were located in areas that were high or low in visual salience. Brief descriptions of the four objects, their locations in the picture, their categorizations as high or low in salience, the means and standard deviations of their relevance ratings, and statistical analyses specifying which pairs of objects in a picture differed significantly on their relevance to the meaning of the scene are given in the Appendix. An example is provided of how the pictures could be used to create stimuli for a change blindness task in which detection of item onset versus offset is contrasted for low-relevance and high-relevance features. The 80 pictures are accessible as jpg files from the first author's Web site at http://marcellm.people.cofc.edu/research.htm

Peripheral Notifications: Effects of Feature Combination and Task Interference

Visual notifications are integral to interactive computing systems. The design of visual notifications entails two main considerations: first, visual notifications should be noticeable, as they usually aim to attract a user`s attention to a location away from their main task; second, their noticeability has to be moderated to prevent user distraction and annoyance. Although notifications have been around for a long time on standard desktop environments, new computing environments such as large screens add new factors that have to be taken into account when designing notifications. With large displays, much of the content is in the user's visual periphery, where human capacity to notice visual effects is diminished. One design strategy for enhancing noticeability is to combine visual features, such as motion and colour. Yet little is known about how feature combinations affect noticeability across the visual field, or about how peripheral noticeability changes when a user is working on an attention-demanding task. We addressed these questions by conducting two studies. We conducted a laboratory study that tested people's ability to detect popout targets that used combinations of three visual variables. After determining that the noticeability of feature combinations were approximately equal to the better of the individual features, we designed an experiment to investigate peripheral noticeability and distraction when a user is focusing on a primary task. Our results suggest that there can be interference between the demands of primary tasks and the visual features in the notifications. Furthermore, primary task performance is adversely affected by motion effects in the peripheral notifications. Our studies contribute to a better understanding of how visual features operate when used as peripheral notifications. We provide new insights, both in terms of combining features, and interactions with primary tasks

Detection of changes through visual alerts and comparisons using a multi-layered display.

The Multi-Layered Displays (MLD) comprise two LCD screens mounted one in front of the other, allowing the presentation of information on both screens. This physical separation produces depth without requiring glasses. This research evaluated the utility of the MLD for change detection tasks, particularly in operational environments. Change Blindness refers to the failure to detect changes when the change happens during a visual disruption. The literature equates these visual disruptions with the types of interruptions that occur regularly in work situations. Change blindness is more likely to occur when operators monitor dynamic situations spread over several screens, when there are popup messages, and when there are frequent interruptions which are likely to block the visual transients that signal a change. Four laboratory experiments were conducted to evaluate the utility of the MLD for change detection tasks. The results from the experiments revealed that, when depth is used as a visual cue, the depth of the MLD has a different effect on the detection of expected changes and unexpected events. When the depth of the MLD is used as a comparison tool, the detection of differences is limited to translation differences in simple stimuli with a white background. These results call into question previous claims made for the MLD regarding operational change detection. In addition, observations and interviews were used to explore whether change blindness occurred in an operational command room. The results suggested that operators develop strategies to recover from interruptions and multitasking. These results call into doubt the wisdom of applying change detection theories to real world operational settings. More importantly, the research serves as a reminder that cognitive limitations found in the laboratory are not always found in real world environments

Detection of changes through visual alerts and comparisons using a multi-layered display

The Multi-Layered Displays (MLD) comprise two LCD screens mounted one in front of the other, allowing the presentation of information on both screens. This physical separation produces depth without requiring glasses. This research evaluated the utility of the MLD for change detection tasks, particularly in operational environments. Change Blindness refers to the failure to detect changes when the change happens during a visual disruption. The literature equates these visual disruptions with the types of interruptions that occur regularly in work situations. Change blindness is more likely to occur when operators monitor dynamic situations spread over several screens, when there are popup messages, and when there are frequent interruptions which are likely to block the visual transients that signal a change. Four laboratory experiments were conducted to evaluate the utility of the MLD for change detection tasks. The results from the experiments revealed that, when depth is used as a visual cue, the depth of the MLD has a different effect on the detection of expected changes and unexpected events. When the depth of the MLD is used as a comparison tool, the detection of differences is limited to translation differences in simple stimuli with a white background. These results call into question previous claims made for the MLD regarding operational change detection. In addition, observations and interviews were used to explore whether change blindness occurred in an operational command room. The results suggested that operators develop strategies to recover from interruptions and multitasking. These results call into doubt the wisdom of applying change detection theories to real world operational settings. More importantly, the research serves as a reminder that cognitive limitations found in the laboratory are not always found in real world environments