The forced-choice (FC) format is used for stimulus presentation and performance assessment in a variety of tasks, including target detection and acquisition, tasks that involve primarily vigilance, monitoring, and search (VMS) behaviors. Laboratory experiments, comparison investigations, and system performance assessments have been reported in the literature with numerous claims about FC procedures, including that they lead to simplification of data handling and increased cost-effectiveness. The present report takes issue with these and other claims, as well as with the underlying assumption that FC procedures are interchangeable with continuous-search procedures, when applied to VMS tasks.
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