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Does incident severity influence surveillance by lifeguards in aquatic scenes?
Author(s) -
LanaganLeitzel Lyndsey K.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.3752
Subject(s) - psychology , salience (neuroscience) , session (web analytics) , context (archaeology) , computer science , geography , cognitive psychology , archaeology , world wide web
Do lifeguards monitor events according to the level of danger they pose to the patron? This study examined this question by displaying 40 min of video of natural swimming activity to three lifeguards while an eye‐tracker recorded their eye position. In a separate session, those same lifeguards viewed 100 short video clips of some of the incidents that had been presented earlier and they were asked to provide a severity rating (0–7) for each one. The proportion of time that an event was monitored was calculated, and was not consistently predicted by incident severity, physical salience, or incident duration, but by the number of swimmers in the scene. Although this study had an extremely small number of lifeguards and should be treated as exploratory, it suggests that lifeguards may have trouble monitoring incidents they deem severe when they are presented in the context of a busy aquatic scene.