JEREMY WOLFE, PHD: SEEING MORE THAN WE THINK WE SEE. MISSING MORE THAN WE WANT TO MISS.

Jeremy Wolfe, PhD

Professor of Ophthalmology and Radiology
Harvard Medical School

Abstract

Your powers of vision and visual cognition are quite amazing. For example, an expert can look at a mammogram for a quarter of a second and beat chance at knowing whether the patient will develop cancer three years from now. At the same time, the same expert mammographer can miss a clearly visible mass under standard viewing conditions. Or consider the fact that you can look at at your resumé for hours and still fail to notice an embarrassing typo (Did you notice the doubled word in the previous sentence?). How can both things be true at the same time? I will illustrate some of your capabilities and some of your limitations and I will attempt to reconcile these competing facts. We will discuss how radiology and radiology research might respond to these bugs and features of the human operating system.

Short Bio

Jeremy Wolfe, PhD, is Professor of Ophthalmology and Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Visual Attention Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the Department of Surgery. Wolfe received an AB in Psychology in 1977 from Princeton and his PhD in Psychology in 1981 from MIT. His research focuses on visual search and visual attention with a particular interest in socially important search tasks in areas such as medical image perception (e.g. cancer screening), security (e.g. baggage screening), and intelligence. This research has been funded at different times since 1982 by NIH (NEI, NIMH, NCI), NSF, AFOSR (Air Force), ONR (Navy), ARO (Army), Homeland Security, and the Nat. Geospatial Agency as well as by IBM, Google, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, & GE. Wolfe taught Introductory Psychology and other courses for 25 years, mostly at MIT. He has served as Past President or Chair of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS), the Psychonomic Soc, APA Division 3, Eastern Psychological Assoc, NAS Panel on Soldier Systems. He has served on the Governing Boards of the Vision Sciences Society, APA Div 1 and 6. Wolfe was Founding Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (CRPI), the newest Psychonomic Society journal, and Past-Editor of Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Wolfe also serves on the Board of the North American Board of the Union for Reform Judaism. He was elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.