Abstract
An experiment compared the benefits of two-level and graded alerting systems as human performance aids in a simulated baggage x-ray screening task. Decision boundaries for the graded systems were varied to produce an unhesitant aid, one which rendered a diagnostic judgment on a majority of trials, and a hesitant aid, one which rendered a judgment on only a minority of all trials. Judgments from the aid were rendered as text messages preceding each trial. The participants' task was to search for threat objects in simulated baggage x-rays; true target presence rate was 50%. The unhesitant three-level aid significantly improved human performance relative to an unaided control condition, and produced better human performance than either the hesitant three-level aid or the two-level aid. The benefits of the unhesitant three-level system arose from the human operators' increased willingness to act on the aid's diagnoses. Results carry implications for the design of automated diagnostic decision aids for security screening and similar signal detection tasks.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.