Lifeguards go through extensive training before earning their certification.

However, surveillance is not evaluated beyond the written examination but it’s what lifeguards spend most of their timing doing and is the most important.

As a quick illustration of the importance and also the challenge of surveillance, take a look at the 6 words below and identify the color of each (say out loud if you’d like :)

If you got any wrong or hesitated on any of them, it was most likely the word “blue” written in red. The reason for the mistake people make with this experiment is explained by the Stroop Effect.

Simply, reading is more of an automatic process whereas identifying color requires higher cognitive demands. The fact that this can vary from person to person is what makes playing the card game Uno so fun!

A research paper published in 2015 in Applied Cognitive Psychology reviewed the challenges lifeguards face when scanning the swimming area for potential swimmers in danger.

Below are some key takeaways as well as ideas for how to reduce these risks.

The optics of what we see
Scenes and context
Stimulus and Memory
Ability to focus over time

(The goal in identifying potential challenges is to contribute to more effective guarding.)

The Optics of What We See

“Seeing” objects is made possible by light reflecting off that object and entering our retina (our eyeballs). Any interference with the light from that object would alter what we see or how we see it.

Interference, or disruptions, can happen in a few different ways.

Water can change what we see when the particles in the water disrupt the light (think of “cloudiness”)
The air-water interface can disrupt the light through refraction
Light from overhead (sun or fluorescent lights) can interfere with the light coming from the image in the water

Scene and Context

The pools and swimming areas that lifeguards are tasked with monitoring vary in size but typically have large viewing areas, which present a couple of challenges.

The first is clutter. With large numbers of swimmers in the pool, a struggling swimmer can be masked by the activities around them. Remember Where’s Waldo?

Another challenge is that in order to give proper attention to each swimmer as a lifeguard scans the pool area, he or she cannot simultaneously give attention to another swimmer.

So, the guard may miss something crucial as a result of a non-crucial activity capturing their focus/attention. This has been observed in lab experiments, like the one you see below.

Video (original selective attention experiment):

Stimulus and Memory

There was a study (Wolfe, Horowitz, and Kenner, 2005) that evaluated the effectiveness of baggage screening (as in airports). They found that when 50% of bags included the item being looked for, the screeners only missed 7% of them but when only 1% of the bags included the item, 30% of the screeners missed it.

Drowning and related events are so rare that their lack of occurrence amounts to a lack of experience for a lifeguard with that particular event.

Ability to Focus Over Time

A lifeguard needs to be able to detect signals of danger over a long time (the length of their shift). This is why it is standard practice for guards to only be on the post for a short period of time (20-30 minutes) before rotating to another location, or taking a break.

Why the need for these short intervals? Studies have shown that focus performance decreases as the observation time increases. The graph below represents the attention of college students during a lecture and shows how attention decreases over time (Gibbs 1992).

But it’s not just time that impacts performance. Heat, specifically above 79 degrees, has been shown to affect cognitive performance in various activities not specific to lifeguarding but the same implications could apply to lifeguards.

So What Can We Do as a Community to Help?

This highlights the value of in-service training for guards. These are opportunities to spend time reviewing and getting practice with those rare events so they become more familiar and help improve a guard’s chance of identifying them.

Here is a link to a blog post with ideas for Running Effective Lifeguard In-Service Trainings that your team can use to help get the most out of your training sessions!

Additional Resources:

Great Expectations: Perceptual Challenges of Visual Surveillance in Lifeguarding: Link

DigiQuatics is a simple tool that aquatics facilities can use to modernize their operation. Visit www.digiquatics.com to learn more.

Lifeguard Surveillance: What Can They ACTUALLY See?