Abstract
The overall aim of this study is an attempt to apply the techniques of training employed in areas such as sonar detection and vigilance to stimuli found in inspection tasks. Three laboratory experiments are presented simulating an inspection task taken as an example from a factory in Algeria: the inspection of razor blades. The first experiment clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of Knowledge of Results technique in producing a stable level of performance efficiency in detections, while Cueing technique and a combination of the two techniques did not prove to be effective when the training aids were completely removed. However, the Knowledge of Results group produced more false alarms than the Cueing groups, but its rate was reduced and reached a low level in the transfer test. The effectiveness of Knowledge of Results in the inspection task was interpreted in terms of its informational aspects. The second experiment was concerned with the relative value of the amount of information provided to subjects. The Full Knowledge of Results group detected more defects than the Partial Knowledge of Results group (who lacks information about missed defects). Concerning false alarms, the Full KR also performed better than Partial KR by producing fewer false alarms. Thus, the use of Full Knowledge of Results in training subjects for inspection tasks was found to be beneficial. Despite an improved overall efficiency in performance, it was noticed that there was a decline when transferring to sessions without training aids. This suggested that subjects could become cue-dependent. Two further questions were, therefore, investigated; first, the effect of fading technique (reducing systematically the amount of information throughout training), second, the introduction of a cognitive pre-training as a preparatory phase to training. Groups receiving only fading technique did not perform better than those where a cognitive pre-training has preceded this technique. It emerged from this third experiment that the cognitive pre-training is useful in training subjects to perform an inspection task.