Brigham To Study Airport Screening

To fight terrorism, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is courting strange bedfellows near you.

The DHS will grant $200,000 to Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital to fund research on factors that cause airport security personnel to overlook dangerous items that appear on the scanner screen.

This grant is a supplement to a $460,000 grant awarded earlier this month to the hospital’s Visual Attention Lab, headed by Jeremy M. Wolfe, a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School.

The hospital has been working with DHS’s Transportation Security Lab since shortly after September 11th, according to Wolfe.

Research has shown that since screeners so rarely find a dangerous item, they are likely to fall prey to what Wolfe calls the “rare target effect.”

“Although their eyes may perceive the shape of a dangerous object, their mind is used to operating as if there is nothing suspicious in the bag,” Wolfe said. “As a result, they may see the item without reacting,”

In the lab, if only two percent of the bags screened contained dangerous items, the test subjects missed the target items 40 percent of the time, according to Wolfe.

“In real airports, the percentage of suspicious bags is much lower, so even under good conditions, the task is extremely difficult,” he said.

Wolfe said that he and his team of researchers have found that while forcing experimental baggage screeners to slow down did not improve their vigilance, subjecting them to frequent re-training sessions seemed to lower the number of missed targets.

“This additional funding will support real world testing for the new techniques and technologies being developed by scientists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56, D-Mass. said in a statement yesterday. “The result will be safer airports and safer air travel for millions of Americans.”