Task complexity in visual inspection

Three types of inspection complexity were tested on an inspection task using both industrial and student subjects. Items inspected varied with regard to the number of different fault types (two, four, or six), whether the inspecting standards for each fault type were the same or different, and whether faults occurred anywhere on the item or only on specific sub-areas. Number of fault types had a large effect on the search component of the task. The effect of same or different standards was largely confined to the decision-making component. There was no effect of faults being distributed across the whole or part of the item. The 18 industrial quality-control personnel were not significantly different in performance from the 48 student subjects tested.