Wolfe Jeremy M, Horowitz Todd S, Kenner Naomi M
Visual Attention Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Nature. 2005 May 26;435(7041):439-40. doi: 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.
我们的社会依赖于视觉筛查任务中的准确表现——例如,在行李中检测刀具或在乳房X光片中检测肿瘤。这些都是对罕见目标的视觉搜索。我们在此表明,目标的稀有性会导致目标检测中出现令人不安的不准确表现:如果观察者不能相当频繁地找到他们正在寻找的东西,那么当目标确实出现时,他们往往会注意不到。