ABSTRACT
Despite its significance to police and security operations, there is relatively little research concerning how people search for buried or hidden objects in the field. In part, this might be because the relevant material could be operationally sensitive and hence, classified.A broader issue is that the psychological literature has located the act of searching largely within the domain of well-defined laboratory paradigms concerning the detection of abstract stimuli amongst distractors or within noise. In the present paper we report an experiment based on memory for buried items that bridges this gap between the laboratory and the field by considering search as an ongoing activity in which participants interact with their environment to discover target objects rather than passively observing. A key research question in this area is how technology might mediate or interact
with the tasks of searching and reporting. In particular, we are concerned with the search for buried land-mines (see figure 1). Previous Human Factors research concerning mine detection equipment has suggested that it would be valuable to provide the user with some form ‘map display’ showing the location of objects as they were detected (Herman and Igelias, 1999; Herman et al., 2001). Studies of the use of mine detectors have characterised the task of mine detection as scanning an environment to compose a mental representation of space and the location of mines within it based upon auditory output from the metal detector (Staszewski, 1999; Stazewski & Davison, 2000). This implies that the expert is building a 2D map of the ground, and then interpreting this map against his knowledge of landmine patterns. In an emergency situation in which there is an absence of mine
Figure 1. Mine Clearance Patrol (image copyright M.O.D).
