Research Interests
Attention use in lifeguarding.
People have the impression that whenever their eyes are open, they are aware of every object and every event occurring within their visual field. Despite this phenomenology, many instances have been documented to the contrary. For instance, many car accidents have occurred because people fail to notice cars or other hazards in their path. The critical factor appears to be attention, where unattended objects or events fail to enter awareness (a phenomenon called inattentional blindness). Inattentional blindness has been studied in many contexts with many types of stimuli, and it has been implicated in real-world problems.
One such problem is pool lifeguards who fail to become aware of people who drown within their zone of coverage. By all accounts, these lifeguards are following their training and are maintaining vigilance in their task. Most certification programs teach lifeguards to use a scan path, a specific search strategy completed on each scan of the pool. A scan path might include, for instance, focusing attention on each person once during each scan of the pool. The problem with this is that by attending to one person, the lifeguard is withdrawing attention from every other person in the pool. When there are many people in the lifeguard's zone, this process of attending to each person could take longer, thereby lengthening the amount of time each person is outside the focus of attention. Because events occurring outside the focus of attention may fail to enter awareness, this could increase the likelihood that a person who drowns will not be saved in time.
Coupled with this, lifeguards are taught to look for specific "features" associated with drowning (e.g., a body that is vertical and low in the water, flailing arms, panicked facial expression, etc.). Not all researchers agree, however, that all drownings are preceded by these behaviors. Because of this, it is possible that some drownings may be missed if they do not occur in the context of these behaviors.
My dissertation will examine the effect of feature vs. singleton strategy use in a laboratory task by using the attentional capture paradigm, and will also examine observer scan paths while viewing videos of normal swimming activity in an attempt to hypothesize which events draw attention naturally.