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

Litchfield, Damien and Ball, Linden J. and Donovan, Tim and Manning, David J. and Crawford, Trevor (2010) Viewing another person's eye movements improves identification of pulmonary nodules in chest x-ray inspection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 16 (3). pp. 251-262. ISSN 1076-898X

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.