College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
101 The Effect of Task-relevant Salient Signal on Visual Search Tasks
Eunseo Han; Maiko Okamura; Brennan Payne; and Jeff Moher
Faculty Mentor: Brennan Payne (Psychology, University of Utah)
Purpose
Visual search is a common activity we do in our daily lives. It is a type of search that requires attention and typically involves scanning for a particular object. However, attention is a limited resource; we cannot pay attention to every detail of our lives so we subconsciously select which element is important and worth paying attention to. This selection process can be hindered by distraction; Moher(2020) investigated the effect of target irrelevant salient signals (distractors) on visual search tasks. Target-relevant signals are the stimuli that convey no useful information for tasks, compared to the task-relevant stimuli that are sometimes helpful in completing tasks. Moher suggested that the target irrelevant salient signals cause early quitting effect: when salient distractors were present, observers quit tasks earlier and thus missed the target which they otherwise would not have.
Missing the target in daily life cannot be too dangerous; it can be as minimal as missing the celebrity you walked past on the street because you were too focused on responding to your friend on the phone. But for some others, it may be more detrimental. Radiologists, for example, have to go through a myriad of medical scans looking for possible abnormalities. Any distractions during their readings of the medical scans are unfavorable since they can lead to misdiagnosis or mistreatment of the patients. In order to assist radiologists in minimizing the risks of missed lesions, computer-aided detection, CAD was designed to highlight the potential abnormalities to encourage additional evaluation from the radiologists. Though previous studies have suggested that CAD increases the accuracy, however, CAD is not always accurate and thus causes false alarms CAD (2, 3).
The present study investigates the effect of task-relevant salient signals on visual search tasks; we utilize task-relevant salient signals since CAD is a task-relevant salient signal. More specifically, we will observe if the early quitting effect can also be seen in visual search tasks with task-relevant salient signals. The observations from this study may ultimately help answer the question of whether the benefit of CAD outweighs the cost of it.
Method
Stimulus Design Stimuli used for this study were created by mimicking the medical scans radiologists read; rotated Ls and Ts in a noisy background represented the object on those medical scans, and the red circle around one of the letters Ls and Ts represented the CAD.
Study Design A between-subject design is employed; half of the participants are assigned to a salient signal present condition, in which red circles sometimes appear around a letter and the other half of the participants are assigned to a no salient si