Jeremy M. Wolfe: Psychonomic Society 2022 Annual Meeting Keynote Address

"Normal Blindness Why We Look But Fail to See," by Jeremy M. Wolfe (Harvard Medical School / Brigham Women's Hospital, USA)
From typos to tumors, humans, performing visual search tasks, manage to miss targets that are "right in front of our eyes." In the psychologically most interesting cases, these are instances where observers fail to respond to stimuli that are clearly visible. The observers may be directly fixating on those stimuli. Such errors are not typically due to pathological visual impairments. They are examples of what I will call “normal blindness." Some demonstrations of these Looked But Failed to See (LBFTS) errors are famous (e.g. inattentional blindness for gorillas). Some LBTFS errors, like missing a target in a visual search for a “T” among “L”s, seem more mundane. I will argue that a wide array of seemingly disparate LBFTS errors have a common basis. Normal blindness is the inevitable by-product of the limited-capacity prediction engine that is our visual system. The processes that evolved to allow us to move through the world are virtually guaranteed to cause us to miss some significant stimuli. I will illustrate with examples from our work using eye tracking with radiologists and with "hybrid foraging" tasks, where observers look for multiple instances of multiple types of targets. If all goes well, you will look, you will fail to see, and you will gain insight into why that happens.
Featuring opening remarks by Penny Pexman, Psychonomic Society Governing Board Chair (University of Calgary, USA) and James Pomerantz (Rice University, USA).