On 14 Feb 2013 at 21:38, Stuart McKelvie wrote: > The immediate question that came to mind was "If 83% of radiologists > did not see the gorilla, what was the rate for non-radiologists?"
In the discussion of this topic, it seems to me there's an implicit assumption that not seeing the gorilla is a bad thing; that radiologists, whose business it is to see things in an X-ray, _should_ have seen the gorilla if psychology hadn't messed them up. I disagree. Their business is not to see gorillas but to see cancer. Their skill is at least partly in knowing how to ignore informatiion not relevant to the critical task (detecting gorillas), and maximizing success at what they're being paid for: to find cancer. It's perhaps an illustration of the fact that multi-tasking may well be an illusion (reference, please). If you're going to waste your detection abilities by being distracted by irrelevancies, you're going to be a lousy reader of X-rays for medical purposes. I'd prefer to have my X-rays read by someone who's not also looking for Jesus and gorillas at the same time. So the flip side of inattention blindness (for gorillas) is attention eagle eye (for cancer). A related argument is that if you told radiologists to "find the gorilla", they'd undoubtedly have little trouble with the task, given that set (cue). But show them an X-ray of a lung, and they start with another set, namely, "find the cancer". In fact, this argument leads to a different prediction, that radiologists may be _less_ likely to see gorillas than non-radiologists. (Unfortunately, Stuart's (limited) data tends not to support this.) OK, I thought of a study which may be related. I believe (which means I don't have the reference handy) that expert chess players have an advantage over dull normals in memorizing chess board positions. But their advantage requires that real chess board positions be used; given random placement of pieces, they do no better than controls. So it may be with radiologists, for whom an X-ray has special meaning in terms of cancer. To the rest of us, it's a bunch of blobs, which could just as well be a gorilla as cancer. Stephen -------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada e-mail: sblack at ubishops.ca --------------------------------------------- --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=23740 or send a blank email to leave-23740-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
