Effects of night work, sleep loss and time on task on simulated threat detection performance.

Study Objectives: To investigate the effects of night work and sleep loss on a simulated luggage screening task (SLST) that mimicked the x-ray system used by airport luggage screeners.

Design: We developed more than 5,800 unique simulated x-ray images of luggage organized into 31 stimulus sets of 200 bags each. 25% of each set contained either a gun or a knife with low or high target difficulty.