Abstract
Searching for targets in the visual world, or visual search, is something we all do every day. We frequently make ‘false-negative’ errors, wherein we erroneously conclude a target was absent when one was, in fact, present. These sorts of errors can have tremendous costs, as when signs of cancers are missed in diagnostic radiology. Prior research has characterized the cause of many of these errors as being due to failure to completely search the area where targets may be present; indeed, roughly one-third of chest nodules missed in lung cancer screening are never fixated (Drew, Võ, Olwal, Jacobson, Seltzer and Wolfe, Journal of Vision 13:3, 2013). This suggests that observers do not have a good representation of what areas have and have not been searched prior to declaring an area target free. Therefore, in six experiments, we sought to examine the utility of reducing the uncertainty with respect to what areas had been examined via online eye-tracking feedback. We hypothesized that providing information about what areas had or had not been examined would lead to lower rates of false negatives or more efficient search, namely faster response times with no cost on target detection accuracy. Neither of these predictions held true. Over six experiments, online eye-tracking feedback did not yield any reliable performance benefits.
Highlights
Visual search is a task that occurs in situations ranging from the mundane (‘search for the pen on your desk’) to the profound (‘search for the sniper’)
In order to assess whether eye-tracking feedback led to a reliable benefit in finding targets, we computed a composite measure of corrected accuracy by subtracting False Alarm Rate from Hit Rate
Eye-tracking feedback was associated with a reliable benefit in only one of the six experiments
Summary
Visual search is a task that occurs in situations ranging from the mundane (‘search for the pen on your desk’) to the profound (‘search for the sniper’). False negative errors (‘no sniper: we are safe’) occur frequently across different domains. False negatives are a serious problem in screening radiology tasks, where rates of retrospectively visible false negative errors reach 30% in some subspecialties (Wallis, Walsh, & Lee, 1991). Observers often fixate the same items repeatedly before finding a simple target (Gilchrist & Harvey, 2000). Some argue that there is effectively no memory for which items have been rejected as targets during a visual search task (Horowitz & Wolfe, 1998). The claim that “visual search has no memory” is certainly too strong
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