Cognitive psychology: rare items often missed in visual searches.
Our society relies on accurate performance in visual screening tasks--for example, to detect knives in luggage or tumours in mammograms. These are visual searches for rare targets. We show here that target rarity leads to disturbingly inaccurate performance in target detection: if observers do not find what they are looking for fairly frequently, they often fail to notice it when it does appear.
Wolfe
Jeremy M
JM
Visual Attention Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02139, USA. wolfe@search.bwh.harvard.edu
Horowitz
Todd S
TS
Kenner
Naomi M
NM
D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005188:False Negative Reactions; D006801:Humans; D011930:Reaction Time; D012107:Research Design; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014785:Vision, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*