Improving Low Prevalence Visual Search
Visual search is the process of searching for a target amongst other objects, for example diagnostic medical imaging or airport baggage security screening. This research looks to find characteristics that lead to missing targets and intervene to increase vigilance and reduce misses.
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Visual search is the process of searching for a target amongst other objects, such as scanning a crowd for the face of a friend or searching your office for your keys. When a person is performing multiple visual searches in succession, targets that are infrequent (i.e., low prevalence or rare) have an elevated risk of being missed. This has important implications for professional visual search tasks, such as diagnostic medical imaging and airport baggage security screening, in which targets are typically low prevalence, and there are potentially life-and-death consequences of missing targets. Research has shown that even experts in these domains experience are prone to missing low prevalence targets in their stimuli of expertise. In this project, we seek to identify ways of predicting who is most susceptible to missing low prevalence targets, and how we can intervene to reduce target misses.