Hättenschwiler Nicole, Merks Sarah, Sterchi Yanik, Schwaninger Adrian
School of Applied Psychology, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Olten, Switzerland.
Front Psychol. 2019 Mar 21;10:525. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00525. eCollection 2019.
The act of looking for targets amongst an array of distractors is a cognitive task that has been studied extensively over many decades and has many real-world applications. Research shows that specific visual-cognitive abilities are needed to efficiently and effectively locate a target among distractors. It is, however, not always clear whether the results from traditional, simplified visual search tasks conducted by students will extrapolate to an applied inspection tasks in which professionals search for targets that are more complex, ambiguous, and less salient. More concretely, there are several potential challenges when interpreting traditional visual search results in terms of their implications for the X-ray image inspection task. In this study, we tested whether a theoretical intelligence model with known facets of visual-cognitive abilities (visual processing , short-term memory , and processing speed ) can predict performance in both a traditional visual search task and an X-ray image inspection task in both students and professionals. Results showed that visual search ability as measured with a traditional visual search task is not comparable to an applied X-ray image inspection task. Even though both tasks require aspects of the same visual-cognitive abilities, the overlap between the tasks was small. We concluded that different aspects of visual-cognitive abilities predict performance on the measured tasks. Furthermore, although our tested populations were comparable in terms of performance predictors based on visual-cognitive abilities, professionals outperformed students on an applied X-ray image inspection task. Hence, inferences from our research questions have to be treated with caution, because the comparability of the two populations depends on the task.
在一系列干扰物中寻找目标的行为是一项认知任务，数十年来一直受到广泛研究，并且有许多实际应用。研究表明，需要特定的视觉认知能力才能在干扰物中高效且有效地定位目标。然而，学生进行的传统简化视觉搜索任务的结果是否能外推到专业人员搜索更复杂、更模糊且不那么突出的目标的应用检查任务中，这一点并不总是很清楚。更具体地说，在根据传统视觉搜索结果对X射线图像检查任务的影响进行解释时，存在几个潜在挑战。在本研究中，我们测试了一个具有已知视觉认知能力方面（视觉处理、短期记忆和处理速度）的理论智力模型是否能够预测学生和专业人员在传统视觉搜索任务和X射线图像检查任务中的表现。结果表明，用传统视觉搜索任务测量的视觉搜索能力与应用X射线图像检查任务不可比。尽管这两项任务都需要相同视觉认知能力的某些方面，但任务之间的重叠很小。我们得出结论，视觉认知能力的不同方面可预测所测量任务的表现。此外，尽管我们测试的人群在基于视觉认知能力的表现预测指标方面具有可比性，但在应用X射线图像检查任务中，专业人员的表现优于学生。因此，对我们研究问题的推断必须谨慎对待，因为这两个人群的可比性取决于任务。
