Specific-token effects in screening tasks: possible implications for aviation security

Screeners at airport security checkpoints perform an important categorization task in which they search for threat items in complex x-ray images. But little is known about how the processes of categorization stand up to visual complexity. The authors filled this research gap with screening tasks in which participants searched for members of target categories in visual displays. The authors found that when targets were sampled with replacement and repetition, participant screeners relied on recognizing familiar targets and had great difficulty using category-general knowledge. The authors observed a "heartbeat" in detection performance--it improved while test images repeated but dropped sharply when unfamiliar targets from the same categories appeared. This reliance on familiarity illuminates the processes of categorization under conditions of visual complexity and suggests limits on those processes. This reliance also has implications for the training and evaluation of screeners in the field.