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Research suggests that signaling system false alarms tend to affect operator compliance, whereas misses tend to affect operator reliance. Conceptually, false alarms and misses affect compliance and reliance via independent cognitive processes, assumed to be two types of trust. The purpose of this study was to test for these underlying processes using a subjective estimate of trust. Method: Using a sample of 44 college students, we tested for trust as a mediator between reliability (90%, 60%) and reliance, compliance, and response rate, for a false alarm prone (FP) system and a miss prone (MP) system. Results: As predicted, trust mediated the relationships between reliability and signal compliance and response rate, but only for the FP system. Additionally, the MP system more directly affected reliance, whereas the FP system more directly affected compliance. Applications of this work indicate that designing for trustable signaling systems may be more important for FP systems.

A variety of factors modify decision making behavior. The current study examines how affective state and inspection duration impact decision time and decision confidence in a simulated luggage screening paradigm. Participants (N=200), from each of three "affect" groups-primed for anger, fear, or sadnessand a control group were tasked with detecting weapon targets with inspection durations of either two seconds (high time pressured inspection) or six seconds (low time pressured inspection). Results revealed a main effect for inspection duration on decision time, such that participants with more highly time-pressured inspections had longer decision latencies after the luggage image timed out. There were also main effects for inspection duration and affective condition on decision confidence, such that participants in the low time pressure group had greater decision confidence and participants in the fear group had lower decision confidence than those in the control group.

Contextual cueing is the implicit association of objects (or ‘cues’) in a visual scene due to repeated exposure, either spatially or semantically. Such associations can aid people in detecting a specific target more quickly and easily when it appears in a familiar context. The goal of this study was to investigate whether and how people utilize “distractors” as contextual cues during a visual target search. Ten undergraduate participants performed a luggage-screening task during which they were connected to an eye tracker. First, participants were trained using 25 luggage images, each of which contained a target (i.e., knife) and a specific distractor (i.e., iPod). During the post-training session, participants screened 100 bags with target base rate set at 50%. The bags contained, either, the distractor and the target (25 bags), the target only (25 bags), the distractor only (25 bags), or neither the distractor nor the target (25 bags). Participants’ fixation counts, saccade counts, saccade amplitudes, and scan paths were assessed. It was found that in the presence of the distractor, participants demonstrated fewer fixations and saccades as well as shorter saccade amplitudes than in the absence of the distractor. This was particularly salient in the absence of the target. The results suggest a higher level of search efficiency when the distractor cue was present, and less organized and more aggressive search pattern in the absence of the distractor cue. We contend that participants formed an implicit association between the distractor and the target and used this association to improve the efficiency of their visual search.