120 DISCUSSION ON PRESENTED PAPERS
— and the two papers which will be read by
title only: Ch. L. Pillmore, Exaggerated Profile
Plotter, New Tool in Geologic Interpretation of
Aerial Photographs and R. G. Ray and W. A.
Fischer, Quantitative Photography, A Geolog-
ical Research Tool, will be discussed in the
continuation session.
May I thank you all for your attention. This
concludes the proceedings of Working Groups
1 and 2 of Commision VII.
Continuation of the Discussion on Presented Papers
The discussion was continued in a supplementary Meeting in Room 381 on Friday afternoon,
9th September. The tape-recordings of the discussions are incomplete and often defective, but the
following is-a précis of what could be extracted from them.
The CHAIRMAN: Continuing the discussion of
the papers and the sequence in which they were
presented, I am glad so many of you came.
Separating the discussion of the recent papers
is not desirable. This was recognized, but within
the time available at the General Meeting it was
not possible to do otherwise. We hope you have
carried your questions with you so we will start
with Dr Zeidner’s paper and inquire if any of
you have any further questions that Dr Zeidner
may be able to clarify, or provide you with
additional information.
A QuESTIONER: I should like to ask Dr
Zeidner about the results of his research.
Dr ZEIDNER: We have some very tentative
data that relates to the size of the unit in terms
of the number of people, the composition of
the group. Remember we are speaking of an
army tactical form of interpretation unit or any
way that they proceed. We have just completed
collecting data about a week ago on a more
comprehensive study.
These results I do not have. I will tell you the
results of the private study which led us into
studying this problem more intently. We ob-
served that operational photo interpreters have
a very loose way of working one with the other.
In some instances they lose time where people
are interacting freely with one another, ex-
changing responses, being influenced by one
another’s responses, so we set up a number of
small groups and we try to equate these in terms
of underlying photo interpreters’ ability.
One group consisted of three people work-
ing and interacting freely, another group con-
sisted of individuals who worked individually
and we combined their responses, they did not
see other responses. The third group worked in
an intermediate way, that is, some of the time
they worked independently and then they came
together and consulted with one another. In
these circumstances we found, much to our
surprise, with the people who worked together as
a team, completely interacting with one another,
that their average performance was poorer than
the average individual performance and this was
the customary way that the army was operating.
Therefore, we are establishing a much more
refined study to carefully equate the underlying
ability. I do not have the data here as to what
are their specialities and the number, composi-
tion and work procedure. At this moment it
seems that it may be an error to have people
consulting one with the other, influencing one
another. We are however reporting in Washing-
ton, DC on October 5th the results of the very
study you are speaking of, and there we have a
relatively (daily) controlled study where we shall
be able to work out the main facts and figures. I
can only tell you that we were interested in it
because we felt that troops working together do
not lose while individuals have their responses
combined in operation.
Dr ZEIDNER: I showed no data on these slides
relative to the proficiency of army tactical photo
interpreters. These slides I showed dealt with
territories of military installations in the United
States and those of operational photo inter-
preters, others in the army and experienced
interpreters.
I might say that I would like to underline
what is said about the difficulty of taking tactical
photo interpretation not only on territories wide-
ly dispersed — you don't have a neatly confined
area — but many of them are very often quite
close to the threshold. It is quite a different
problem looking for a vehicle in a hillside as
against trying to detect or identify an aircraft
sitting on a runway.
QUESTION: How many total hours are spent
for testing.
ANSWER: Within the tactical set-up we have
a 3-day testing session. We give them 3 days of
performance tests. We give a full 3 days, with
necessary breaks it comes out to about 6 hours
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