Using Visual Attention Video Games and Traditional Interventions to Improve Baggage Screening

Abstract

Vigilance tasks represent an increasingly critical performance segment for civilians and military personnel alike. In order to combat the vigilance decrement and aid in making personnel more effective, it is necessary to find innovative ways to mitigate the vigilance decrement and aid the human visual system. One such technique lies in an interesting field; recent findings suggest that action video games modify the visual attention system in a way that is particularly useful to performance in a sustained attention task. This article discusses the nature of these findings in the context of improving performance in a common vigilance task: baggage screening.