Phenomenon that infrequent targets are easily missed
In psychology, the prevalence effect is the phenomenon that one is more likely to miss (or fail to detect) a target with a low prevalence (or frequency) than a target with a high prevalence or frequency. A real-world application of this phenomenon occurs in airport security screening; since a very small proportion of those going through security checkpoints carry weapons, security staff may fail to detect those attempting to carry weapons onto a plane.[1]
In visual perception, target prevalence describes the salience (or visibility) of an object or objects in the environment and influences visual search.[2]
An experiment[3] similar to an x-ray baggage search at an airport reveals how likely one is to make errors when searching for low-prevalence targets. A 50-percent prevalence produced a seven-percent error rate, typical for laboratory search tasks of this sort; a 10-percent prevalence produced a 16-percent error rate, and prevalence under one percent produced a 30-percent error rate.
Humans normally search for common things, such as a favorite jelly-bean flavor in a collection of flavors. When they look for rare things (such as a jelly bean in a bag of lollipops), they are likely to abandon the search quickly because the probability of success and the stakes are low. Some searches combine low prevalence with high stakes; medical screenings such as mammography or cytopathology, is an important search for a target rarely present (typically under one percent).[4] Missing a rare target, such as a weapon smuggled onto an airplane, may have serious consequences.
^J. M. Wolfe, D. N. Brunelli, J. Rubinstein, T. S. Horowitz. Prevalence effects in newly trained airport checkpoint screeners: Trained observers miss rare targets, too. Journal of Vision, 2013; 13 (3): 33 DOI: 10.1167/13.3.33
^Wolfe, J. and Van Wert, M. (2010) Varying Target Prevalence Reveals Two Dissociable Decision Criteria in Visual Search. Current Biology 20, 121-124.
^Wolfe, J. M., Horowitz, T. S., & Kenner, N. M. (2005). Rare items often missed in visual searches. Nature, 435, 439-440.
^Fenton, J. J., Taplin, S. H., Carney, P. A., Abraham, L., Sickles, E. A., D’Orsi, C., et al. (2007). Influence of computer-aided detection on performance of screening mammography. New England Journal of Medicine, 356, 1399–1409.
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