Keynote Address/Opening Ceremony

Visual Search Gets Real: From the Lab to the Airport to the Radiology Suite

Chair: Jeremy M. Wolfe Harvard University

We are built to search. Our ancestors foraged for food. We search for pens, coffee cups, and cars in parking lots. Even when a desired object is in plain view, we search because we can only recognize one (or a very few) objects at one time. We are adapted to these limits and we manage pretty well, using attentional processes that guide us to likely targets and that enable us to abandon search when the target is not present. But what happens if the target is almost never there? When we ask radiologists to screen x-rays for cancer or airport security to find threats in luggage, we are asking them to be very good at finding very rare targets that are very important. In this talk, Wolfe will describe some of the processes that govern everyday search tasks, and he will illustrate what can happen when these processes meet the demands of modern, socially important search tasks.