Augmenting Threat Detection Through Online Eye-Tracking Feedback
Abstract
Consider a soldier faced with an increasingly common task: monitor a location for suspicious behavior or search an area for potential threats. This is a difficult, high stakes task where mistakes can have deadly consequences. The job is made more challenging by the fact that suspicious behaviors and actual threats may be exceedingly infrequent. As a result, most of the soldierÕs time during these tasks is spent rejecting areas as not currently threatening. We know a great deal about cognitive limits on selective attention, sustained attention, and working memory. However, we know very little about the limits on soldier performance in monitoring dynamic scenes. Most of our knowledge is based on simple laboratory experiments. Laboratory experiments are very useful, but they are far removed from the sorts of threat detection tasks that are increasingly important to the soldier. For example, most laboratory studies have a brief trial structure that is not well-suited to understanding how attention and working memory interact with one another during tasks that require sustained attention to changing scenes. As a result there is a gap in our knowledge about the causes of failure during threat detection tasks, thus making the challenge of improving performance intractable. This proposal will address these limitations in two primary aims. Aim 1 will identify the fundamental limitations of the human visual attention system that can produce errors in complex threat detection tasks. Aim 2 will evaluate a promising intervention that provides attentional support to this type of task. Ultimately, this proposal: 1) will provide a novel description of capacity limitations that govern human monitoring of sustained dynamic scenes, and 2) will investigate the utility of augmenting threat detection by providing online feedback with respect to the soldierÕs eye-movements.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 19, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1510346
Entities
People
- Trafton Drew
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- United States Army
- University of Utah