Towards understanding and improving geoscientific data interpretation

Abstract

Geoscientific data interpretation is a highly subjective and complex task as human intuition and biases play a significant role. Based on these interpretations, however, mining and petroleum industries make decisions with paramount of financial implications. As a first step towards understanding and improving the interpretation process, we carried out two experiments to monitor the human-data interactions during the process of identifying â??targetsâ?? (porphyry-style intrusive systems) within the aeromagnetic imagery. This is achieved by capturing the eye gaze position using an eye tracker system and the brain responses using electroencephalography (EEG). The first experiment was intended to analyse the target spotting performance and the data observation patterns. For this experiment participants performed exercises, where the same magnetic image was presented in different orientations. Some key findings include: inconsistencies in target spotting performance within and between the interpreters; an improvement performance when the data were viewed in multiple orientations; and a strong correlation between the target spotting performance and efficient (systematic) data observation pattern. There was no correlation between success in identifying targets and the participantsâ?? perception of their expertise. The second experiment was designed to identify the characteristics of the targets that are easier to detect using EEG. For this experiment images with targets and without targets were presented in a rapid visual display. The analysis on the image characteristics based on the human visual attention model show a strong correlation between target spotting difficulty and dispersion of the visual attention.