SBE-UKRI: "Looked but failed to see" errors in human vision

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We have all had the experience of failing to notice something that is in plain view. Sometimes this can even be something that we are actively looking for, like typos in our writing or signs of cancer in a lung x-ray. The aim of our project is to understand the basic science of these "looked but failed to see" (LBFTS) errors and to investigate possible ways to reduce these potentially dangerous errors.LBFTS errors are not like a disease caused by a single virus. There are a variety of different paths that lead someone to fail to report something that is clearly visible when pointed out. We will study three such paths. Some LBFTS errors can be thought of as a version of bad luck. You can't process everything, so some visual stimuli get processed adequately and some don't. But it is nothing about the stimulus per se. The experiments in Aim 1 investigate whether LBFTS errors are mainly due to these random errors or whether there is something about certain stimuli that makes them less likely to be found. The idea of "looking" but failing to see, requires that we define "looking". When you look at one point, there is a region around that point within which you could find your target, even if you don't. This is known as the functional visual field (FVF) or useful field of view (UFOV). In Aim 2, we study biases within the FVF. For example, if you are reading, while you are looking at one word, you are biased to the next words to the right (or to the left, e.g., for Arabic or Hebrew), rather than the words directly above or below where you are fixating. We are asking similar questions but about vision more generally. The two principal investigators on this project have different ideas about where the biases in the FVF come from. Some Aim 2 experiments constitute an "adversarial collaboration" in which we will seek to resolve our differences. Finally, Aim 3 is devoted to LBFTS errors that occur when you are doing one task but when you might want to be keeping an eye out for other stimuli (e.g. when a doctor is examining a lung x-ray, it may show more than just the fractured rib about which the patient is complaining, such as a suspicious sign of cancer). Here we will try to develop ways to help observers to do their primary task whilst staying attuned to important but non-related events.