Posted By:	Institute for Simulation & Training		Contact:	Randall Williams
Phone:	407-882-1317		Email:	rwilliam@ist.ucf.edu

Airport security personnel may be better trained to recognize potentially life-threatening security violations as a result of a new Federal Aviation Administration research grant.

The FAA recently announced the award, which will fund research by members of the Psychology Department and Institute for Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Heading up the research are research scientist Dr. Stephen Fiore, associate research scholar Dr. Florian Jentsch and associate psychology professor Dr. Clint Bowers of the Psychology Department’s Team Performance Laboratory and Dr. Eduardo Salas, psychology professor and research faculty member at the Institute for Simulation and Training.

They will employ the $140,000 FAA grant to discover ways to help security screeners rapidly become proficient in recognizing visual cues to dangerous items hidden in passengers’ luggage.

After the airborne suicide attacks of September 11, 2001, world attention quickly focused on holes in airport security that allowed terrorists to smuggle weapons onboard commercial aircraft. Concern that security screener accuracy was declining led the FAA to seek scientific research to help create more efficient ways to teach employees the necessary skills.

The UCF research team will investigate methods designed to speed up security screeners’ ability to learn observation skills they need to recognize dangerous items in scanned luggage.

Existing studies indicate that expert screeners may need fewer visual cues than novices to recognize patterns that lead to identification of items. The team hopes to isolate these expert pattern recognition techniques and incorporate them into the training curriculum for new security screening personnel.

“This grant represents a unique opportunity to meld some of our current research with such an important issue,” says Dr. Fiore. “We are all very excited to do our part in helping aviation security.”

Modern research from the cognitive and brain sciences, according to Dr. Fiore, is increasingly being recognized as relevant to problems of national significance. “UCF recognizes this and actively supports such efforts, making it an ideal environment in which to conduct research,” Dr. Fiore says.

Members of the Psychology Department’s Team Performance Laboratory perform basic and applied research on human performance and cognition, specifically as they apply to team processes and team training.