Framing and Context Effects in Visual Search Training

Framed incentive structures and context effects may have training implications for applied visual search tasks such as airline luggage screening. Participants were trained with various incentive structures that focused, or were sensitive to, various signal detection outcomes. Also, participants were trained with different context representations (weapons or produce search). Twenty-four hours later, participants performed a transfer session in which the incentive structure and target set was unknown. Incentive structures that focused on negative outcomes (misses) led to a response bias that was closer to optimal compared to structures that focused on positive outcomes (hits). Task context affected response bias but had mixed effects on sensitivity. Results of this study may better inform the design of training and automated support for airline luggage screening and similar applied visual search tasks.