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 Calendar ColloquiaCognitive CritiqueReading Groups |
Spring 2008 Colloquia
4:00-5:30
April 17
Jeremy Wolfe, Harvard Medical School
"Visual Search: Is it a matter of life and death?"
Abstract
In this talk, I will give an introduction to the problem of visual search and to the Guided Search model that my lab has been working on for a number of years. I will then talk about three new lines of work.
- Searching for skin: Are skin colors (desaturated oranges and reds) privileged in visual search in ways that other, equivalent colors (e.g. desaturated purples and greens) are not?
- Guidance by scene properties: We know that basic attributes of objects like their color and orientation can guide search. Thus, in a search for a red car, you direct your attention to red things. You also know that cars are on roads, not walls. Does this scene information guide search? If so, how?
- Finally, I will make an effort to convince you that my particular intellectual obsessions are, in fact, "a matter of life and death". Important applied search tasks like airport baggage screening and routine mammography are characterized by very rare targets (low prevalence). Low prevalence causes problems in the lab in the form of dramatically elevated miss error rates. If there are comparable problems in the field, this could really be a matter of life and death.
Things to read if you have an unquenchable need for more background on our work on visual search (doesn’t everyone?).
- Wolfe, J. M., Horowitz, T.S., Kenner, N. (2005). Rare items often missed in visual searches. Nature, 435, 439-440.
- Wolfe, J.M., Horowitz, T.S. (2004). What attributes guide the deployment of visual attention and how do they do it? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5 1-7
- Wolfe, J. M. (2007). Guided Search 4.0: Current Progress with a model of visual search. In W. Gray (Ed.), Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems (pp. 99-119). New York: Oxford.
- Wolfe, J. M. (2003). Moving towards solutions to some enduring controversies in visual search. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(2): 70-76.
These can be found on our website: http://search.bwh.harvard.edu/new/publications.html