Rare items often missed in visual searches

Rare items often missed in visual searches

Wolfe, Jeremy M., Todd S. Horowitz, and Naomi M. Kenner
Nature 435, no. 7041 (2005): 439–440
https://doi.org/10.1038/435439a

“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.

Visual search is the subject of voluminous lab literature. Typically, observers perform several hundred searches and targets are presented on 50% of trials. But target prevalence in baggage checks or cancer screening is much lower (about 0.3% in routine mammography²).”

— Wolf et al.