Cognitive Science Evaluation of Safeguards Inspector List Comparison Activities using Human Performance Testing

While conducting in-field safeguards verification activities, international nuclear safeguards inspectors are confronted with information-rich environments in which they are expected to complete their tasks while maintaining high levels of situational awareness. In this setting, situational awareness is crucial both for their personal safety in an industrial environment and to enable the detection of any potentially inconsistent activities that could indicate an anomaly. Many in-field activities require inspectors to compare an IAEA-constructed list to other lists or items within the facility, such as physical inventory items, seals, records of shipments and receipts, or other documentation. The format of these lists could have a substantial impact on the ease or difficulty of these inspection tasks. How, then, can the IAEA format these types of lists so that safeguards inspectors can complete their inspection tasks with the highest levels of accuracy, timeliness, and situational awareness? In 2017, our team identified this area as one in which research could contribute to both the field of cognitive science and to international nuclear safeguards. In this paper, we will describe our research questions posited for human performance testing related to visual inspection and change detection tasks. We will then describe the experimental design and methods including our six experimental conditions for list presentation. Then we describe how task performance results were used to compare the list presentation conditions. We will close with an analysis and conclusions from the experiment, and proposals for additional research.