Evaluation of expert skills in refinery patrol inspection: visual attention and head positioning behavior

We aimed to clarify expert skills in refinery patrol inspection using data collected through a virtual reality experimental system. As body positioning and postural changes are relevant factors during refinery patrol inspection tasks, we measured and analyzed both visual attention and head positioning behavior among experts and “knowledgeable novices” who were engaged in the engineering of the refinery but had less inspection experience. The participants performed a simulated inspection task, and the results showed that 1) expert inspectors could find more defects compared to knowledgeable novices, 2) visual attention behavior was similar between knowledgeable novices and experts, and 3) experts tended to position their heads at various heights and further from the inspection target to obtain visual information more effectively from the target compared to knowledgeable novices. This study presented the differences in head positioning behavior between expert and novice inspectors for the first time. These results suggest that to evaluate the skills used in inspecting relatively larger targets, both visual attention and head positioning behavior of the inspectors must be measured.