Daniel Ernst¹, Jeremy M. Wolfe²; ¹Bielefeld University, ²Brigham & Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School

Why do people miss clearly visible targets in visual search? Such misses can have serious consequences, e.g., in radiology or airport security. Others have shown that observers can respond with above chance accuracy to forced-choice questions about objects that they deny seeing in inattentional blindness paradigms (Nartker et al. 2025, eLife, 13, RP100337). In inattentional blindness, the missed item is typically irrelevant to the primary task. Here, we seek evidence for partial knowledge about missed targets that observers have been actively seeking. We used a mixed hybrid search design where observers search through displays of pictures of objects. In a block of trials, a target could be one of three specific pictures or any picture from three object categories. This design induces relatively high numbers of miss errors for known targets, especially for categorical targets. Whenever observers missed a target, the identical target was presented again at a random location among random distractors in an immediate “repetition trial”. Participants were not informed about this manipulation and received no feedback after miss errors. Participants had 85% and 94% accuracy in standard target present trials with categorical and specific targets, respectively. In repetition trials, participants found just 62% of the categorical targets and 80% of the specific targets that they had missed in the previous trial. Interestingly, when the target was found on a repeated trial, it was fixated more quickly than it was fixated in a normal trial. This suggests that some partially processed information from the previous, missed trial might prime the search for the repeated target. On the other hand, the high error rates on repeated trials indicate that whatever led to the original miss still makes a subsequent miss quite likely.

Acknowledgements: Daniel Ernst was supported by grant ER 962/3-1; Jeremy Wolfe was supported by grants NIH EY01700, CA207490, and NSF2146617