Cognitive psychology: rare items often missed in visual searches.
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 15917795.
- Also identified by PMC identifier PMC4224304.
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Abstract
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.