Lifeguards engage in a continuous process of deciding whether swimmers are in danger or not. The variety of behaviours that distressed swimmers show makes it difficult to impart declarative knowledge to this effect during lifeguard training. As an alternative, we propose a novel training tool that requires novice participants to rapidly categorise…

Lifeguard drowning detection in swimming pools and beach settings is influenced by experience. The current experiment explores the cognitive skills that might underlie this experience effect. Lifeguard and non-lifeguard performance in a domain-free multiple object avoidance (MOA) task and a partially domain-free functional field of view (FFOV)…

How does domain expertise influence dynamic visual search? Previous studies of visual search often use abstract search arrays that are devoid of applied context, with comparatively few studies exploring applied naturalistic and dynamic settings. The current research adds to this literature by examining lifeguard drowning-detection across two…

Lifeguard surveillance is a complex task that is crucial for swimmer safety, though few studies of applied visual search have investigated this domain. This current study compared lifeguard and non-lifeguard search skills using dynamic, naturalistic stimuli (video clips of confederate swimmers) that varied in set size and type of drowning.…