VIGILANCE AND FAMILIARITY WITH A TASK - A PRODUCTION LINE EXPERIMENT

By which mechanism(s) can successful learning permit an error to occur ? Is this phenomenon controllable? In the present study carried out in the factory where this phenomenon was observed professional operators were faced with an error detection task at a production line. It was found that the more experience operators had, the less reliable they w ere. Operators were consistently effective only when a random event wa s superimposed on the task. These findings suggest that errors due to the application of a perceptual schema in detection activities can be reduced by including into these activities a new randomly occurring st imulus event.