The Impact of Information Presentation on Visual Inspection Performance in the International Nuclear Safeguards Domain

International nuclear safeguards inspectors are tasked with verifying that nuclear materials in facilities around the world are not misused or diverted from peaceful purposes. They must conduct detailed inspections in complex, information-rich environments, but there has been relatively little research into the cognitive aspects of their jobs. We posit that the speed and accuracy of the inspectors can be supported and improved by designing the materials they take into the field such that the information is optimized to meet their cognitive needs. Many in-field inspection activities involve comparing inventory or shipping records to other records or to physical items inside of a nuclear facility. The organization and presentation of the records that the inspectors bring into the field with them could have a substantial impact on the ease or difficulty of these comparison tasks. In this paper, we present a series of mock inspection activities in which we manipulated the formatting of the inspectors’ records. We used behavioral and eye tracking metrics to assess the impact of the different types of formatting on the participants’ performance on the inspection tasks. The results of these experiments show that matching the presentation of the records to the cognitive demands of the task led to substantially faster task completion.