Stroboscopic Training Enhances Anticipatory Timing

International Journal of Exercise Science 5(4) : 344-353, 2012. The dynamic aspects of sports often place heavy demands on visual processing. As such, an important goal for sports training should be to enhance visual abilities. Recent research has suggested that training in a stroboscopic environment, where visual experiences alternate between visible and obscured, may provide a means of improving attentional and visual abilities. The current study explored whether stroboscopic training could impact anticipatory timing—the ability to predict where a moving stimulus will be at a specific point in time. Anticipatory timing is a critical skill for both sports and non-sports activities, and thus finding training improvements could have broad impacts. Participants completed a pre-training assessment that used a Bassin Anticipation Timer to measure their abilities to accurately predict the timing of a moving visual stimulus. Immediately after this initial assessment, the participants completed training trials, but in one of two conditions. Those in the Control condition proceeded as before with no change. Those in the Strobe condition completed the training trials while wearing specialized eyewear that had lenses that alternated between transparent and opaque (rate of 100ms visible to 150ms opaque). Post-training assessments were administered immediately after training, 10-minutes after training, and 10-days after training. Compared to the Control group, the Strobe group was significantly more accurate immediately after training, was more likely to respond early than to respond late immediately after training and 10 minutes later, and was more consistent in their timing estimates immediately after training and 10 minutes later

Who should be searching? Differences in personality can affect visual search accuracy

© 2017 Visual search is an everyday task conducted in a wide variety of contexts. Some searches are mundane, such as finding a beverage in the refrigerator, and some have life-or-death consequences, such as finding improvised explosives at a security checkpoint or within a combat zone. Prior work has shown numerous influences on search, including “bottom-up” (physical stimulus attributes) and “top-down” factors (task-relevant or goal-driven aspects). Recent work has begun to focus on “observer-specific” factors, examining how searchers' attributes might influence search performance. A logical extension involves exploring whether some individuals are better suited to conduct visual searches than other individuals. The current study examined whether certain personality characteristics relate to visual search performance in a large sample of professional searchers employed by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration. Of the “big five” personality traits (neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness), only conscientiousness significantly correlated with visual search accuracy. Both early-career and experienced professional searchers demonstrated a significant relationship between conscientiousness scores and accuracy on a simple visual search task. These findings validate the notion that searchers' attributes impact their visual search performance and suggest that personality assessments might prove useful for hiring and selection decisions regarding professional tasks that incorporate visual search

Improvement in visual search with practice: Mapping learning-related changes in neurocognitive stages of processing

© 2015 the authors. Practice can improve performance on visual search tasks; the neural mechanisms underlying such improvements, however, are not clear. Response time typically shortens with practice, but which components of the stimulus–response processing chain facilitate this behavioral change? Improved search performance could result from enhancements in various cognitive processing stages, including (1) sensory processing, (2) attentional allocation, (3) target discrimination, (4) motor-response preparation, and/or (5) response execution. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) as human participants completed a five-day visual-search protocol in which they reported the orientation of a color popout target within an array of ellipses. We assessed changes in behavioral performance and in ERP components associated with various stages of processing. After practice, response time decreased in all participants (while accuracy remained consistent), and electrophysiological measures revealed modulation of several ERP components. First, amplitudes of the early sensory-evoked N1 component at 150 ms increased bilaterally, indicating enhanced visual sensory processing of the array. Second, the negative-polarity posterior–contralateral component (N2pc, 170–250 ms) was earlier and larger, demonstrating enhanced attentional orienting. Third, the amplitude of the sustained posterior contralateral negativity component (SPCN, 300–400 ms) decreased, indicating facilitated target discrimination. Finally, faster motor-response preparation and execution were observed after practice, as indicated by latency changes in both the stimulus-locked and response-locked lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs). These electrophysiological results delineate the functional plasticity in key mechanisms underlying visual search with high temporal resolution and illustrate how practice influences various cognitive and neural processing stages leading to enhanced behavioral performance

Action video game playing is associated with improved visual sensitivity, but not alterations in visual sensory memory

Action video game playing has been experimentally linked to a number of perceptual and cognitive improvements. These benefits are captured through a wide range of psychometric tasks and have led to the proposition that action video game experience may promote the ability to extract statistical evidence from sensory stimuli. Such an advantage could arise from a number of possible mechanisms: improvements in visual sensitivity, enhancements in the capacity or duration for which information is retained in visual memory, or higher-level strategic use of information for decision making. The present study measured the capacity and time course of visual sensory memory using a partial report performance task as a means to distinguish between these three possible mechanisms. Sensitivity measures and parameter estimates that describe sensory memory capacity and the rate of memory decay were compared between individuals who reported high evels and low levels of action video game experience. Our results revealed a uniform increase in partial report accuracy at all stimulus-to-cue delays for action video game players but no difference in the rate or time course of the memory decay. The present findings suggest that action video game playing may be related to enhancements in the initial sensitivity to visual stimuli, but not to a greater retention of information in iconic memory buffers

Informing Aviation Security Workforce Assessment and Selection Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the aviation security industry with short-and long-term challenges relating to workforce assessment that require thoughtful responses. In the short-term, the pandemic has made it difficult to administer typical assessment methods. In the long-term, as the pandemic’s impact lessens and travel regains pre-pandemic levels, organizations will need to decide how best to allocate current employees and onboard new employees. While the pandemic has created both selection and assessment challenges, it now opens the door for innovations to support organizations to be better prepared to support the traveling public. The current paper discusses a tool, XRAY Screener, that may offer a way to achieve such goals. XRAY Screener has been shown to effectively and efficiently identify individuals who are best-suited to conduct X-ray screenings. The tool offers a flexible way to assess screeners, making it a viable means to assess performance during and after the pandemic

Rare targets are rarely missed in correctable search

ABSTRACT—Failing to find a tumor in an x-ray scan or a gun in an airport baggage screening can have dire consequences, making it fundamentally important to elucidate the mechanisms that hinder performance in such visual searches. Recent laboratory work has indicated that low target prevalence can lead to disturbingly high miss rates in visual search. Here, however, we demonstrate that misses in low-prevalence searches can be readily abated. When targets are rarely present, observers adapt by responding more quickly, and miss rates are high. Critically, though, these misses are often due to response-execution errors, not perceptual or identification errors: Observers know a target was present, but just respond too quickly. When provided an opportunity to correct their last response, observers can catch their mistakes. Thus, low target prevalence may not be a generalizable cause of high miss rates in visual search. Whether looking for car keys on a desk or a friend in a crowd, people constantly engage in visual searches of the environment. Ironically, some of the most critical searches often exhibit disturbingly high rates of error: Thirty percent of malignancies are missed in radiological examinations (Berlin, 1994; Renfrew, Franken, Berbaum, Weigelt, & Abu-Yousef, 1992), and a significant percentage of dangerous items are reportedly missed in airport baggage screening. Radiology and airport screening are alike in that the targets of the search are quite rare, and a recent laboratory study (Wolfe, Horowitz, & Kenner, 2005) suggested that low target prevalence per se might directly underlie the high error rates. When searching arrays somewhat similar to those viewed by airport baggage screeners, observers missed only 7% of the targets when target frequency was high (target present on 50 % of trials), but an alarming 30 % when target frequency was low (target present on 1 % of trials). Address correspondence to Mathias Fleck, Duke University, LSR