Criterion Shift and Anchoring in a Discrimination Training Paradigm: The Importance of Pre-Training

Abstract

We report an empirical investigation on pre-training and its effects on overall training accuracy. This study was developed to explore a potential new venue aiming at improving overall training effectiveness for airport X-Ray screeners by means of pre-training. Specifically, we looked at presence or absence of pre-training and how it affected training performance. Pre-training was theoretically framed around the concept of criterion shift and anchoring in a signal detection paradigm. Results showed that pre-training successfully mitigated participants' initial biases brought to the training environment by shifting participant's criterion to a more neutral position in terms of discrimination training rules and heuristics.