The Manifestation of Incidental Findings in Different Experimental Visual Search Paradigms

Abstract

Background. Incidental " ndings are items of visual search that are potentially of signi" cance, but were not the main object of the initial search. ! ey have been previously widely discussed in the " eld of radiology. However, the underlying perceptual mechanisms of such phenomenon are still unclear. Objective. ! e current study aims to examine incidental " ndings in di# erent paradigms of visual search in order to reveal their primary perceptual aspects. Design. Two behavioral visual search experiments were conducted. ! e mixed hybrid search task model was used in the " rst experiment, while the subsequent search miss e# ect was employed in the second experiment. ! e task was to " nd targets among distractors, according to given instructions. Stimuli material consisted of images of real-life objects that were randomly distributed across the screen for each trial. Results. Accuracy and reaction time of the participants were analyzed in both experiments. Similar e# ects were observed for both parameters. Speci" c targets in the " rst experiment and typical targets in the second experiment were found signi" cantly faster and more accurately in comparison to categorical and atypical targets. Moreover, this tendency did not depend on the order of target identi" cation. Hence, the prevalence of the targets was revealed to be the primary factor in the case of incidental " ndings. Conclusion. ! e study revealed the emergence of incidental " ndings in both experiments. Typical or speci" c targets were detected signi" cantly more accurately, compared to atypical or categorical targets. Subsequent search misses were not detected, suggesting that target prevalence could be a crucial factor that is speci" c for incidental " ndings.