Use of job aid to promote systematic search under different levels of task complexity

Abstract

Job aids of various kinds have improved visual-inspection performance. In particular, these job aids include a dynamic pointer that traces a systematic scan path across a search field. The efficacy of this specific job aid, however, has only been verified under a limited set of conditions. Moreover, the effectiveness of this job aid is a function of the speed of the pointer. Thus, it remains to be determined what pointer speeds will yield the best performances under a wide range of conditions. These conditions are defined here by four of the following task-complexity factors: background density, fault rate, target conspicuity, and fault mix; the performance measure used is search accuracy. In general, increasing either the speed of the cursor or task complexity degraded accuracy, and the optimal pointer speed was specific to the conditions.

Visual lobe shape characteristics of experienced industrial inspectors and inexperienced subjects

“…In practical situations, visual search time is always much longer than the time required for the decision‐making process; therefore, it is a critical determinant for the design of visual inspection tasks. Different kinds of job aids have been proposed for shortening visual time and improving inspection performance (Koenig, Gramopadhye, & Melloy, 2002; Tetteh, Jiang, Mountjoy, Seong, & McBride, 2008).…”

The impact of inspector's cognitive style on performance in various visual inspection display tasks

“…There are many studies where the pacing effect on the accuracy of inspection tasks have been investigated (e.g., Drury, 1994;Koenig, Gramopadhye, and Melloy, 2002;Tetteh et al, 2008). However, one of our hypotheses is that the pacing may have different impacts on different cognitive styles.…”

“…Nickles, Sacrez, and Gramopadhye (1998) asked subjects to search the area as the cursor moved along the zigzag path only with their eyes in low or high complexity tasks. The speed of a cursor is also manipulated with different levels of task complexity, i.e., background density, fault probability, background characters, and fault mix (Koenig, Gramopadhye, and Melloy, 2002).…”

Training methods for visual inspection tasks

“…McDonald and Gramopadhye (1998) studied the influences of decision making speed as well as the relative value of making the correct or incorrect decision. When the speed at which a search pattern is executed increases, the accuracy of the inspection decreases (Koenig et al, 2002). Drury (1994) describes this phenomenon as a trade-off that occurs when either speed or accuracy increases.…”

“…This means that speed and accuracy are negatively correlated. The study conducted by Koenig et al (2002) looked at how the speed of an inspection was impacted by various complexity levels of the inspection task. Participants were asked to scan a field of characters and indicate when a particular character was identified.…”