Jeremy M. Wolfe

Jeremy Wolfe is best known for his theoretical and empirical contributions to understanding attention in visual search, the process by which we find things are looking for, like car keys on a table or cancer in a mammogram. Wolfe's Guided Search theory is the one of the leading theories of human visual search behavior, explaining decades of results. Researchers around the world follow Wolfe's lead, testing and extending Guided Search. After 9/11, Wolfe applied Guided Search to detecting weapons in airport screening, finding that such rare targets are often missed. He showed that radiologists face similar problems when performing tasks such as screening for breast or lung cancer, and he has worked to develop solutions to such problems.