Oxyopia Abstract

April 19, 2007
Thursday, 4:00 PM
489 Minor Hall

Jeremy M. Wolfe, PhD
Professor of Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School
Host: Dennis Levi

Title

Visual Search: Is it a matter of life and death?

Abstract

Like Gaul, this talk is divided into three parts: 1) 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. The details of Guided Search will be discussed in my other talk. 2) I will place the problem of search into the larger context of visual perception and show how our need to use selective attention leads to some interesting perceptual errors. 3) Finally, in an effort to convince you that my particular intellectual obsessions are, in fact, "a matter of life and death." I will discuss an important practical problem in search. Rare targets are hard to find simply because they are rare. We ask people to find rare targets in some very important tasks like airport baggage screening and routine mammography so, if low target prevalence makes search difficult, this could be a real problem.

[Back to Wolfe - Oxyopia Page]