Incidental Findings in Visual Search

The objective of the current study is to experimentally examine the effect of “incidental findings” in visual search. “Incidental findings” are items that might have value for the searcher, however they are not the primary targets of search. They were originally described in radiology, and only recently they became the phenomenon of interest in the field of vision science. Particularly, there was one study on this effect, conducted by Wolfe and colleagues (Wolfe et al., 2017) that introduced a novel experimental model for examining “incidental findings”. However, since this model was used only once, it needs additional experimental verification. Furthermore, the underlying mechanisms of “incidental findings” seem to resemble those of other well-known perceptual phenomena, particularly, “subsequent search misses”. Taking all that into consideration, the clarification of independence of “incidental findings” is necessary. Therefore, it was decided to study “incidental findings” in two separate experimental paradigms, so that the potential influence of the used methods would be determined. Two experiments were conducted: in one of them a typical “subsequent search misses” paradigm was used, in another -the modified model introduced by Wolfe and colleagues. At the same time, the stimuli and experimental task were carefully designed to fit the definition of “incidental findings”. The results showed the emergence of “subsequent search misses” in the first experiment, while “incidental findings” were detected in the second one. Hence, the influence of experimental paradigm on the results of performance is argued. The findings in this research bring the independence of “incidental findings” from other perceptual effects under question, since it needs further experimental clarification.