If I Am So Good at This, Why Do I Miss So Much?

Jeremy M. Wolfe¹

Humans are very good at visual search tasks, looking for targets in scenes filled with distractors. Trained humans are very good at applied search tasks like medical and security screening. However, people make errors and these can be associated with high costs like missed disease. This talk will illustrate three sources of error that are rooted in human cognitive function: Crowding effects: where neighboring items hide clearly visible targets. Change blindness: where the limits on visual processing make observers insensitive to substantial changes in an image. And prevalence effects: where rare targets are missed simply because they are rare.