Errors in spotting key targets soar alarmingly if they appear only infrequently during screening.
Abstract
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.
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Supplementary information
Supplementary Methods
This file describes the methods for the experiments in more detail, including some further aspects of the results. (DOC 62 kb)
Supplementary figure 1
Shows example of test stimulus (JPG 79 kb)
Supplementary figure 2
Shows additional analysis of sequential effects in the reaction time data for Experiment One. (JPG 18 kb)
Supplementary figure 3
Shows accuracy data for Experiment Two. (JPG 12 kb)
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Wolfe, J., Horowitz, T. & Kenner, N. Rare items often missed in visual searches. Nature 435, 439–440 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/435439a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/435439a
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