This article reports research on visual lobe shape differences between experienced industrial inspectors and inexperienced students and the effects of years of inspection experience on lobe-shape characteristics. Comparison of the visual lobes of students and inspectors showed that lobe roundness of the inspectors was higher than that of the students. Also, marked improvement in lobe roundness and regularity for inspectors was evident in those inspectors who had relatively long experience in inspection work, indicating that daily inspection practice did not seem to be an effective way of improving lobe-shape characteristics. The increased lobe roundness level did not change, however, even when the inspectors had not performed an inspection job for a long period of time. This finding suggests that the improved lobe-roundness level could be maintained even without any follow-up inspection practice. It seems that intensive lobe training rather than inspection practice may be required to improve lobeshape characteristics in a short time. No relationship was found between lobe-shape parameters and the ranked inspection performance of the inspectors, which indicated that, for the inspectors, better search performance may be related more to their better decision making rather than to their higher lobe-roundness level or inspection speed. C 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This study investigated the effects of visual display polarity and stimulus exposure duration on visual lobe shape. Analysis showed that regardless of display polarity and exposure duration combinations tested here, visual lobe contours were slightly irregular and asymmetric, of medium roundness, with a moderately rough boundary, and horizontally elongated with a mean length-width ratio of 1.53. Visual lobes mapped with negative display polarity were significantly rounder, slightly more regular and more symmetric along the vertical axis, compared with those mapped with positive polarity. Under the different polarity conditions, there were no significant differences in visual lobe area, perimeter, boundary smoothness, and elongation. When stimulus exposure duration increased from 200 to 400 msec. and from 200 to 300 msec., there were significant increases in the visual lobe area, perimeter, roundness, boundary smoothness, and regularity. No such changes were found when duration increased from 300 to 400 msec. Exposure durations did not have a significant effect on the shape categories of elongation and horizontal symmetry for the different stimuli. There were no statistically significant interactions between polarity and stimulus exposure duration for any of the lobe shape indexes used here.

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Effects of the difficulty of a peripheral target, the priority assignment of attentional resources for simultaneous peripheral and foveal tasks, and the foveal task load and order of testing of cognitive foveal loadings on visual lobe shape characteristics were investigated. Analysis showed that lobe shape characteristics were affected by target difficulty but not the low foveal load. For the tasks used here, attentional resources were sufficient for participants to perform both peripheral and foveal tasks concurrently; therefore, priority assignment of attentional resources had no effect on lobe shape. With regard to order of testing of foveal loading, lobe roundness, boundary smoothness, and vertical symmetry improved with a positive practice effect for the groups tested in the high level-low level order. The implication is that providing training or practice to participants on a task with a higher level foveal load could optimize lobe roundness, boundary smoothness, and symmetry. Performance on the foveal task was better with easy peripheral targets than difficult targets and better for the foveal-primary than for the peripheral-primary conditions, presumably because of the larger proportion of attentional resources allocated to the foveal task for these two groups.

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