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Cognitive psychology

Rare items often missed in visual searches

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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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Figure 1: The effects of target prevalence on search performance.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Visual Attention Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    Jeremy M. Wolfe, Todd S. Horowitz & Naomi M. Kenner

  2. Department of Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, 02114, Massachusetts, USA

    Jeremy M. Wolfe & Todd S. Horowitz

Authors
  1. Jeremy M. Wolfe
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  2. Todd S. Horowitz
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  3. Naomi M. Kenner
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jeremy M. Wolfe.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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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