Cognitive psychology: rare items often missed in visual searches.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Wolfe JM
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4224304 | biostudies-literature | 2005 May
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Cognitive psychology: rare items often missed in visual searches.
Wolfe Jeremy M JM Horowitz Todd S TS Kenner Naomi M NM
Nature 20050501 7041
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. ...[more]
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