Abstract
Many real-world searches (e.g., radiology and baggage screening) have rare targets. When targets are rare, observers perform rapid, incomplete searches, leading to higher miss rates. To improve search for rare (10% prevalence) targets, we provided eye movement feedback (EMF) to observers during their searches. Although the nature of the EMF varied across experiments, each method informed observers about the regions of the display that had not yet been inspected. We hypothesized that feedback would help guide attention to unsearched areas and increase the proportion of the display searched before making a target-absent response, thereby increasing accuracy. An eye tracker was used to mark fixated areas by either removing a semiopaque gray overlay (Experiments 1 and 4) as portions of the display were fixated or by adding the overlay once the eye left a segment of the image (Experiments 2 and 4). Experiment 3 provided automated EMF, such that a new region was uncovered every 540 milliseconds. Across experiments, we varied whether people searched for “Waldo” in images from “Where’s Waldo?” search books or searched for a T among offset Ls. We found weak evidence that EMF improves accuracy in Experiment 1. However, in the remaining experiments, EMF had no effect (Experiment 4), or even reduced accuracy (Experiments 2 and 3). We conclude that the one positive result we found is likely a Type I error and that the EMF method that we used is unlikely to improve visual search performance.
Highlights
Radiologists miss as many as 30% of cancers in their examinations (Berlin, 1994; Bird, Wallace, & Yankaskas, 1992)
We conclude that the one positive result we found is likely a Type I error and that the eye movement feedback (EMF) method that we used is unlikely to improve visual search performance
We evaluated the effectiveness of EMF through four experiments where we compared rare target detection rates between EMF and control groups
Summary
Radiologists miss as many as 30% of cancers in their examinations (Berlin, 1994; Bird, Wallace, & Yankaskas, 1992). To what occurs in radiology, many of these misses are selection errors (Peltier & Becker, 2016a) whereby the observer fails to inspect the target before responding target absent. To explain this pattern, researchers have posited that rare targets result in low quitting thresholds (Wolfe et al, 2005; Wolfe & Van Wert, 2010). Observers inspect less of the display before responding that the target is absent, resulting in faster reaction times but many misses (Gur et al, 2003; Rich et al, 2008; Schwark et al, 2012; Schwark, Macdonald, Sandry, & Dolgov, 2013; Schwark, Sandry, & Dolgov, 2013; Van Wert, Horowitz, & Wolfe, 2009; Wolfe et al, 2005; Wolfe et al, 2007)
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