Adopting a multidisciplinary approach to maximising performance during military visual search tasks.

During the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, many UK military personnel were killed or injured by improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Insurgents sought to develop new ways of concealing and detonating IEDs, and UK forces invested significantly in finding increasingly effective methods of detecting and avoiding them. Between 2010 and 2014 the UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory's Human and Social Sciences Group (HSSG) was asked to investigate the factors that might affect the performance of specialist search teams in the identification of IEDs.

The importance of search strategy for finding targets in open terrain.

A number of real-world search tasks (i.e. police search, detection of improvised explosive devices (IEDs)) require searchers to search exhaustively across open ground.

An examination of the processing capacity of features in the Thatcher illusion.

Detection of the Thatcher illusion (Thompson, Perception, 9:483-484, 1980) is widely upheld as being dependent on configural processing (e.g., Bartlett & Searcy, Cognitive Psychology, 25:281-316, 1993; Boutsen, Humphreys, Praamstra, & Warbrick, NeuroImage, 32:352-367, 2006; Donnelly & Hadwin, Visual Cognition, 10:1001-1017, 2003; Leder & Bruce, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53A:513-536, 2000; Lewis, Perception, 30:769-774, 2001; Maurer, Grand, & Mondloch, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6:255-260, 2002; Stürzel & Spillmann, Perception, 29:937-942, 2000).

Discriminating grotesque from typical faces: evidence from the Thatcher illusion.

The discrimination of thatcherized faces from typical faces was explored in two simultaneous alternative forced choice tasks. Reaction times (RTs) and errors were measured in a behavioural task. Brain activation was measured in an equivalent fMRI task.

Perceptual and decisional factors influencing the discrimination of inversion in the Thatcher illusion.

The Thatcher illusion (Thompson, 1980) is considered to be a prototypical illustration of the notion that face perception is dependent on configural processes and representations. We explored this idea by examining the relative contributions of perceptual and decisional processes to the ability of observers to identify the orientation of two classes of forms-faces and churches-and a set of their component features. Observers were presented with upright and inverted images of faces and churches in which the components (eyes, mouth, windows, doors) were presented either upright or inverted.