[CTN] Talk of potential interest: visual search, June 27 2:30pm

[Matthijs van der Meer]

Time: 2:30pm June 27, PAS 3026, ABC Room

*Title:*
 From the berry patch to the radiology suite: Why visual search matters.
*Speaker: *
Jeremy M Wolfe, PhD
Ophthalmology & Radiology, Harvard Medical School
Visual Attention Lab,Brigham & Women's Hospital
*Abstract:*
Visual search problems are everywhere (especially if you happen to study
visual search). First, I will give a rationale for why we have to search
at all. Why isn’t “Where’s Waldo” just “There’s Waldo”. Then I will turn
to research inspired by three real world search tasks.
1)Hybrid search: How long would it take you to determine that none of
your 1000 Facebook friends were in this picture of 100 people at a
party? This is a combination of a visual search and a memory search. How
do you do that?
2)Foraging: You are picking berries. When is it time to move to the next
bush? Probably not when you have picked every berry on this bush, but
what are the rules and what happens when the world changes?
3)Prevalence effects: What happens if you as searching for something
that is almost never there: A bomb in luggage, a tumor in a mammogram?
I hope to convince you that we search because we have to and we study
search because it is both interesting and important.