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FB Kolloq WS24: Jeremy Wolfe

„Visual search: From the lab to the courtroom. Are ‘Look but fail to see’ errors negligent?”

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Prof. Dr. M. Wolfe, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, US
„Visual search: From the lab to the courtroom. 
Are ‘Look but fail to see’ errors negligent?”

People fail to see clearly visible targets in a variety of situations. These could be typos that you tried to find in your most recent manuscript. They could be gorillas that unexpectedly appear in a video that you show to your students. Some of these missed targets are more important. For instance, radiologists sometimes miss tumors in mammograms that turn out to be “retrospectively visible” (i.e. clearly detectable when pointed out after the fact). We will discuss these “Look but fail to see” (LBFTS) errors. Why do people miss items that are clearly detectable and in view? I will argue that LBFTS errors are often a form of “normal blindness.” Normal or not, in medicine, such LBFTS errors can lead to lawsuits for negligent malpractice. In the US these lawsuits are often lost or need to be settled out of court. Clearly, radiologists can be negligent when they miss abnormalities, but we will argue that, in many cases, these LBFTS errors would be treated differently by the legal profession if judges and lawyers better understood how someone can miss something “right in front of their eyes.”