Our Visual Attention Lab studies how you find what you are looking for and why you sometimes miss that target, even though it is, literally, “right in front of your eyes”. Such errors are mildly annoying when you fail to find something in the kitchen cabinet. They can be much more consequential if a radiologist fails to find a tumor in a mammogram. The lab uses behavioral and eye tracking methods to study the mechanisms of successful search and the causes of “look but fail to see (LBFTS) errors”.

The roots of these LBFTS errors lie in the fundamental limits of our visual and cognitive systems. We can’t process everything in the current scene, so we usually process a few items, near our current center of gaze. The eyes fixate on a new spot three or four times a second so, even if we fixate on or near the thing we are looking for, our eyes may move on to a new spot before successfully processing that target. Simply looking in the right place is not a guarantee of finding something. At the same time, our introspection tells us that vision is effortless; we open our eyes and we think that we see what is there. The mismatch between this erroneous “metacognition” and the reality of our limited capabilities leads to our surprise when we miss something obvious. Moreover, it may contribute to a jury’s willingness to convict a clinician of negligence, if and when they miss something obvious.