Keynote Address

Normal Blindness: Why We Look But Fail To See

Thursday, November 17  |  7:30 PM - 8:30 PM U.S. Eastern Time 
Closed captioning, as well as an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter, will be available for this address.

Jeremy M. Wolfe  

Harvard Medical School / Brigham Women's Hospital, USA

Abstract 
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.

About Jeremy
Jeremy M. Wolfe is Professor of Ophthalmology and Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. He is Director of the Visual Attention Lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Wolfe received an AB in Psychology in 1977 from Princeton and his PhD in Psychology in 1981 from MIT. His research focuses on visual search and visual attention with a particular interest in socially important search tasks in areas such as medical image perception (e.g. cancer screening), security (e.g. baggage screening), and intelligence. His lab has been funded since 1982 by NIH (NEI, NIMH, NCI), NSF, AFOSR (Air Force), ONR (Navy), ARO (Army), Homeland Security, and the Nat. Geospatial Agency as well as by IBM, Google, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, & GE. Wolfe taught Intro. Psychology and other courses for 25 years, mostly at MIT. He has served as Past President or Chair of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS), Psychonomic Society, APA Division 3, Eastern Psychological Association, NAS Panel on Soldier Systems. He has served on the Governing Boards of the Vision Sciences Society and APA Divisions 1 and 6. Wolfe is Founding Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (CRPI), the newest Psychonomic Society journal, and Past-Editor of Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics.  Wolfe also serves on the Board and Oversight Committee of the North American Board of the Union for Reform Judaism. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

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