Prevalence-based decisions undermine visual search

Schwark, Jeremy; MacDonald, Jacqueline; Sandry, Joshua; Dolgov, Igor

doi:10.1080/13506285.2013.811135

Cited by 30 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Schwark, MacDonald, Sandry, and Dolgov () took a different approach to the problem. Instead of cueing on a trial‐by‐trial basis, they told observers that target prevalence was either 50% or 96% throughout a block of trials.…”

Section: Kundel Raises the Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Ishibashi, Kita, and Wolfe () stimuli were fairly typical for the laboratory studies reported here. They used the synthetic XRST stimuli first introduced by Wolfe et al (), with a set size of 18, which produced target‐present RTs of around 1 s. For comparison, in the Lau and Huang () experiments, stimuli were 18 photorealistic objects, presented on a gray background (similar to the Wolfe et al, stimuli, but without the added noise); RTs were around 1.2 s. In contrast, observers in the Schwark, MacDonald, et al () experiments were presented with arrays of hundreds of tiny capital letters. This is a substantially more difficult search task, and RTs were accordingly much higher, ranging from 4 to 20 s. Under these conditions, observers seem to have relied much more heavily on guessing.…”

Section: Kundel Raises the Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

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Prevalence in Visual Search: From the Clinic to the Lab and Back Again

Horowitz¹

2017

Jpn Psychol Res

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One of the most important applications of visual search is in the interpretation of medical images. Like many applications of visual search, medical image interpretation is typically characterized as a low "prevalence" context, meaning that targets are relatively rare. Breast cancer screening, for example, has a prevalence of around 0.5%. In this review, I present a survey of research on the effects of prevalence on visual search from both the medical image perception and basic psychological science perspectives. In order to provide some quantitative rigor, I include a meta-analysis of the effects of low prevalence on visual search performance. I synthesize findings from both fields, and identify both the practical suggestions for clinical practice and theoretical insights for cognitive psychologists.

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Section: Kundel Raises the Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Kundel Raises the Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Prevalence in Visual Search: From the Clinic to the Lab and Back Again

Horowitz¹

2017

Jpn Psychol Res

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show abstract

“…A recent study by Schwark, MacDonald, Sandry, and Dolgov (2013) found that when perceptual decision making is difficult, searchers are prone to make prevalence-based decisions. In the authors’ paradigm, participants searched for letter stimuli in cluttered arrays with as many as 300 distractor letters (increasing to 700 in later studies).…”

Section: What Causes the Lpe?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Failures of perception in the low-prevalence effect: Evidence from active and passive visual search.

Hout¹,

Walenchok²,

Goldinger³

et al. 2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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In visual search, rare targets are missed disproportionately often. This low-prevalence effect (LPE) is a robust problem with demonstrable societal consequences. What is the source of the LPE? Is it a perceptual bias against rare targets or a later process, such as premature search termination or motor response errors? In 4 experiments, we examined the LPE using standard visual search (with eye tracking) and 2 variants of rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) in which observers made present/absent decisions after sequences ended. In all experiments, observers looked for 2 target categories (teddy bear and butterfly) simultaneously. To minimize simple motor errors, caused by repetitive absent responses, we held overall target prevalence at 50%, with 1 low-prevalence and 1 high-prevalence target type. Across conditions, observers either searched for targets among other real-world objects or searched for specific bears or butterflies among within-category distractors. We report 4 main results: (a) In standard search, high-prevalence targets were found more quickly and accurately than low-prevalence targets. (b) The LPE persisted in RSVP search, even though observers never terminated search on their own. (c) Eye-tracking analyses showed that high-prevalence targets elicited better attentional guidance and faster perceptual decisions. And (d) even when observers looked directly at low-prevalence targets, they often (12%–34% of trials) failed to detect them. These results strongly argue that low-prevalence misses represent failures of perception when early search termination or motor errors are controlled.

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“…Put simply, by recording the eye movements we were able to determine the changes in search guidance that took place as overlap and depth were manipulated, focusing on the types of errors made by participants when they were searching. Specifically, we examined the errors in terms of a taxonomy that has been developed previously [13]- [16]. Participants often fail to detect targets when searching because they fail to fixate (i.e., look at) the target object.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the benefits of stereoscopic displays to visual search: methodology and initial findings

et al. 2015

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Visual search is a task that is carried out in a number of important security and health related scenarios (e.g., X-ray baggage screening, radiography). With recent and ongoing developments in the technology available to present images to observers in stereoscopic depth, there has been increasing interest in assessing whether depth information can be used in complex search tasks to improve search performance. Here we outline the methodology that we developed, along with both software and hardware information, in order to assess visual search performance in complex, overlapping stimuli that also contained depth information. In doing so, our goal is to foster further research along these lines in the future. We also provide an overview with initial results of the experiments that we have conducted involving participants searching stimuli that contain overlapping objects presented on different depth planes to one another. Thus far, we have found that depth information does improve the speed (but not accuracy) of search, but only when the stimuli are highly complex and contain a significant degree of overlap. Depth information may therefore aid real-world search tasks that involve the examination of complex, overlapping stimuli.

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Prevalence-based decisions undermine visual search

Cited by 30 publications

References 30 publications

Prevalence in Visual Search: From the Clinic to the Lab and Back Again

Prevalence in Visual Search: From the Clinic to the Lab and Back Again

Failures of perception in the low-prevalence effect: Evidence from active and passive visual search.

Assessing the benefits of stereoscopic displays to visual search: methodology and initial findings

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