Not that kind of bias

What is it about?

The world presents us with too much visual stimulation, so we use our attention to select some of the visual input for further processing. Interestingly, we turn out to have idiosyncratic biases about what parts of the visual scene we select. In this paper, we asked people to find the letter, T, in a briefly flashed ring of seven Ls and one T. People were more likely to identify the T in some locations than others and this bias varied reliably from person to person. You have no idea about your personal visual biases, but this could be related to how you can miss something that appears “right in front of your eyes”.

Featured Image

Photo by Santa Barbara on Unsplash

Photo by Santa Barbara on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This paper reports on a bit of our research on “Look But Fail To See” (LBFTS) errors. These are cases where you fail to notice something that is clearly visible, when it is pointed out to you. LBFTS errors can be fairly trivial. Like the typo in the previous paragraph (Did you notice it?). Such errors can also be a literal matter of life and death, as when a clinician misses a tumor on an x-ray or security screener lets something dangerous through a checkpoint. We try to understand LBFTS errors in the lab so that we can reduce their frequency in the world.

Perspectives