The role of human factors in airport baggage screening

Abstract

We all spend much time visually scanning our surrounding environment. Visual searching is particularly crucial for public safety when it comes to those occasions that can have fatal consequences. Human factors that influence decision-making in target detection are, however, widely considered as determinants for whether there are prohibited items or not. Cognitive performance of security screening can be influenced by the experiences of the searcher, but also can be affected by the task itself, which is closely associated with principles of perception, visual attention and working memory. This paper critically examines five aspects of the searching task: low target salience; the unknown target set; simultaneous search for all types of targets; the possible occurrence of multiple targets; and low target prevalence. It highlights the challenges of baggage screening and proposes two means for improving the accuracy and the efficiency of the task: operational strategies and off-the-job training. Further studies are needed to confirm whether those strategies could strike a balance between efficacy and efficiency for airport baggage screening in a real-life setting.