Priority or Parity? Scanning Strategies and Detection Performance of Novice Operators in Urban Surveillance

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) is increasingly used as a means to ensure the safety and security of critical infrastructure and public spaces. Operators in control rooms are responsible for monitoring multiple camera feeds that generally exceed the number of screens available. Using a realistic video surveillance simulation, the current study investigates strategies that untrained operators use to deal with this visual overload. The majority of participants adopted a priority strategy by fixating some scenes more than others, as opposed to a parity strategy of devoting roughly equal time across all screens—although participants were largely unaware of the strategy they had used. A parity approach led to better detection performance, perhaps because less time elapsed between viewing each available camera feed thus reducing the probability that an incident could pass unnoticed. The identification of successful scanning strategies can be used to inform operator training.