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Viewing another person's eye movements improves identification of pulmonary nodules in chest x-ray inspection.

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

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<mark>Journal publication date</mark>09/2010
<mark>Journal</mark>Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
Issue number3
Volume16
Number of pages12
Pages (from-to)251-262
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Double reading of chest x-rays is often used to ensure that fewer abnormalities are missed, but very little is known about how the search behavior of others affects observer performance. A series of experiments investigated whether radiographers benefit from knowing where another person looked for pulmonary nodules, and whether the expertise of the model providing the search behavior was a contributing factor. Experiment 1 compared the diagnostic performance of novice and experienced radiographers examining chest x-rays and found that both groups performed better when shown the search behavior of either a novice radiographer or an expert radiologist. Experiment 2 established that benefits in performance only arose when the eye movements shown were related to the search for nodules; however, only the novices' diagnostic performance consistently improved when shown the expert's search behavior. Experiment 3 reexamined the contribution of task, image, and the expertise of the model underlying this benefit. Consistent with Experiment 1. novice radiographers were better at identifying nodules when shown either a naive's search behavior or an expert radiologist's search behavior, but they demonstrated no improvement when shown a naive model not searching for nodules. Our results suggest that although the benefits of this form of attentional guidance may be short-lived, novices can scaffold their decisions based on the search behavior of others.