[新知] ScieceDaily-為什麼我們找不到東西？
Why We Can't Always Find What We're Looking for (and Sometimes Find What
Isn't There)
ScienceDaily (Jan. 15, 2010) — When people look for things that are rare,
they aren't all that good at finding them. And it turns out that the reverse
is also true: When people look for something common, they will often think
they see it even when it isn't there. A new report published online on
January 14th in Current Biology, offers new insight into why this happens and
may suggest some simple methods to help airport security personnel looking
for weapons and radiologists looking for tumors get better at their jobs,
according to the researchers.
當人們尋找一些比較少的東西，通常很難找到。但情況若相反，也是真實的，當人們找一
些很易於見到的東西，他們通常認為他們找得到，儘管那東西可能不存在。這篇報導發表
在1/14的Current Biology，提供了新的觀點與意見，並且指出與機場安檢或是醫學檢驗相
關，也根據實驗提出一些簡單的方法加以改善。
"We know that if you don't find it often, you often don't find it," said
Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School. "Rare stuff gets missed." That means
that if you look for 20 guns in a stack of 40 bags, you'll find more of them
than if you look for the same 20 guns in a stack of 2,000 bags.
But the lingering question was, why? Do people simply start going too fast,
get careless, and say "no" too much? If that were true, then people looking
for common stuff should also start going too fast, get careless, and say
"yes" too much. It turns out that's not what they do, the new study shows.
People do send false alarms when looking for common items, but they don't say
"yes" faster, they say "no" much more slowly.
"When nothing is there, they don't give up on the response," Wolfe explained.
"It's all terribly adaptive behavior for a beast in the world. If you know
berries are there, you keep looking until you find them. If they are never
there, you don't spend your time hunting."
But that adaptive inclination in nature can cause problems when people start
looking for rare things, like guns in baggage or breast cancer. Airport
screeners know there probably isn't a gun in your bag, and radiologists know
that a tumor probably isn't going to be there, but they really want to catch
it if there is. "We aren't well-built for that and make more errors than we'd
like."
Wolfe thinks that there may be ways to solve this problem, or at least to
improve upon our searching skills. He says that his team suspects error rates
may be lowered by offering people in jobs like these some simple retraining
at the start of every shift. If they spend a couple of minutes doing a
simulated search for common weapons or tumors, they might then do a better
job at really finding rare ones for the next 30 minutes or so.
The researchers plan to conduct tests at the clinic and the airport, to see
whether the effects seen in the laboratory will hold true in the real world
where the stakes are higher. They will also test strategies designed to make
people less prone to making the wrong call.
The researchers include Jeremy M. Wolfe, Brigham and Women's Hospital,
Cambridge, MA, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA; and Michael J. Van Wert,
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Cambridge, MA
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原始網址：
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100114143010.htm
算是一篇蠻有趣的研究。
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