Subjective assessments of cognition and affect and their relationship with objective performance: Individuals with high levels of cognitive failures or negative affect miss more rare visual targets

Abstract

The detection of particular targets is critical in applied contexts, such as identifying cancers in diagnostic medical imaging and finding weapons in airport baggage security screening. Missed targets can have dire consequences in such contexts. These contexts are also typically characterized by low prevalence or rare targets such that most searched-through images do not contain targets. A substantive body of evidence demonstrates that humans are much more likely to miss targets when they are rare. Therefore, it is critical to understand the factors that may mitigate or exacerbate this general tendency to miss rare targets. The present study considered the relative role of individual differences in cognitive failures, cognitive empathy, and negative affect (i.e., depression, anxiety, and stress) in predicting the detection of rare targets. Across two experiments, there was evidence that individuals experiencing elevated cognitive failures were more likely to miss the rare targets. In Experiment 1, negative affect was also related to performance, but it was only cognitive failures that made a unique contribution to explaining target-present accuracy when they were pitted against one another. There was no evidence that cognitive empathy was linked to performance. These findings have important theoretical implications and also highlight potential avenues for intervention to improve the detection of rare targets.