Problems of Ensuring Reliability and Validity of the Results of Psychophysiological Expertise

Ensuring the safety of production activities includes the task of reducing the risks associated with the violation of professional reliability of personnel, the inconsistency of individual psycho-physiological qualities of a person with production assignments. Professional psycho-physiological selection is aimed to solve the problem of ensuring professional activity safety, as well as other psycho-physiological studies that allow assessing the functional state of a person, to reveal the influence of production factors on it, and to develop scientifically grounded criteria for its evaluation. Despite the significant importance of the tasks solved by psycho-physiological expertise, the technical support used to conduct it cannot provide an adequate level of reliability and validity of the obtained results. The purpose of the work is to assess the problems of ensuring reliability and validity of the results of psycho-physiological studies using software test complexes. The object of the study was software complexes used for psycho-physiological examination in Ukraine. During the research we used the following methods: synthesis of the generalized principle of technical realization of the problem of studying the time of human reaction to visual stimuli; analysis of the impact of the technical implementation method on the results of research; deduction of problems reliability and validity of the results of psycho-physiological studies. It is established that the sources of non-systematic measurement error, which commensurates in magnitude with the useful signal, are the high values of the time of visual stimuli formation / presentation, the registration of the person's response and the lack of guaranteed time of the computer response to external events. Another factor reducing reliability of the results obtained by using software systems is the presentation of stimuli-tasks using means of displaying visual information (screens, signal indicators, lamps, light-emitting diodes) that are not isolated from external influences. The visual characteristics of the information display means essentially depend on external conditions (room illumination, the location of the monitor relative to light sources, viewing angles), which can lead to distortion of the results of studies related to the recognition of visual stimuli. The analysis showed that we can achieve increasing in accuracy, reliability and validity of psycho-physiological expertise by applying additional hardware devices to the personal computer. These devices help form test stimuli in the isolated environment and record the answers of the subjects with a sufficient level of accuracy. The use of such devices will increase the reliability of the results of psycho-physiological studies, standardize them, and carry out metrological verification.