ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2021
The invisible breast cancer: Experience does not protect against inattentional blindness to clinically relevant findings in radiology.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Inattentional blindness in medicine.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Review
- The ins and outs of errors in oncology imaging: the DAC framework for radiologists.Frontiers in oncology · 2024Review
- The invisible 800-pound gorilla: expertise can increase inattentional blindness.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2023Article
- Assistive artificial intelligence for ultrasound image interpretation in regional anaesthesia: an external validation study.British journal of anaesthesia · 2023Article
- Normal blindness: when we Look But Fail To See.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2022Review
- Exploring the utility of assistive artificial intelligence for ultrasound scanning in regional anesthesia.Regional anesthesia and pain medicine · 2022Observational
- Artificial Intelligence in Computer Vision: Cardiac MRI and Multimodality Imaging Segmentation.Current cardiovascular risk reports · 2021Article
- Characteristics of expert search behavior in volumetric medical image interpretation.Journal of medical imaging (Bellingham, Wash.) · 2021Article
- Melanoma in the Blink of an Eye: Pathologists' Rapid Detection, Classification, and Localization of Skin Abnormalities.Visual cognition · 2021Article
- Spatial and time domain analysis of eye-tracking data during screening of brain magnetic resonance images.PloS one · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
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Abstract
Retrospectively obvious events are frequently missed when attention is engaged in another task-a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. Although the task characteristics that predict inattentional blindness rates are relatively well understood, the observer characteristics that predict inattentional blindness rates are largely unknown. Previously, expert radiologists showed a surprising rate of inattentional blindness to a gorilla photoshopped into a CT scan during lung-cancer screening. However, inattentional blindness rates were higher for a group of naïve observers performing the same task, suggesting that perceptual expertise may provide protection against inattentional blindness. Here, we tested whether expertise in radiology predicts inattentional blindness rates for unexpected abnormalities that were clinically relevant. Fifty radiologists evaluated CT scans for lung cancer. The final case contained a large (9.1 cm) breast mass and lymphadenopathy. When their attention was focused on searching for lung nodules, 66% of radiologists did not detect breast cancer and 30% did not detect lymphadenopathy. In contrast, only 3% and 10% of radiologists (N = 30), respectively, missed these abnormalities in a follow-up study when searching for a broader range of abnormalities. Neither experience, primary task performance, nor search behavior predicted which radiologists missed the unexpected abnormalities. These findings suggest perceptual expertise does not protect against inattentional blindness, even for unexpected stimuli that are within the domain of expertise.
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