Air passengers' luggage screening: What is the difference between naïve people and airport screeners?

Abstract

In a simulated task of airport security inspection for threat items of knives, guns and IEDs, the difference between screeners and naïve people was analysed in terms of detection performance, attention allocation and workload. The detection performance of screeners was significantly better than that of naïve people. Compared to naïve observers, screeners concentrated on one or two potential threat items and ignored some irrelevant contents in the X-ray images which are showed by fixation maps. In order to understand how observers missed targets the workload between hit and miss decisions was compared. Unfortunately, there was no difference on workload when they hit or missed the targets where the dwell time on the targets of the hit decisions was longer than that of miss decisions. The findings may highlight how the search expertise is developed and provide information for improving training program. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.