Highly dangerous road hazards are not immune from the low prevalence effect

Abstract

The low prevalence effect (LPE) is a cognitive limitation commonly found in visual search tasks, in which observers miss rare targets. Drivers looking for road hazards are also subject to the LPE. However, not all road hazards are equal; a paper bag floating down the road is much less dangerous than a rampaging moose. Here, we asked whether perceived hazardousness modulated the LPE. To examine this, we took a dataset in which 48 raters assessed the perceived dangerousness of hazards in recorded road videos (Song et al. in Behav Res Methods, 2023. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02299-8) and correlated the ratings with data from a hazard detection task using the same stimuli with varying hazard prevalence rates (Kosovicheva et al. in Psychon Bull Rev 30(1):212–223, 2023. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02159-0). We found that while hazard detectability increased monotonically with hazardousness ratings, the LPE was comparable across perceived hazardousness levels. Our findings are consistent with the decision criterion account of the LPE, in which target rarity induces a conservative shift in criterion. Importantly, feedback was necessary for a large and consistent LPE; when participants were not given feedback about their accuracy, the most dangerous hazards showed a non-significant LPE. However, eliminating feedback was not enough to induce the opposite of the LPE—prevalence induced concept change (Levari et al. in Science 360(6396):1465–1467, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap8731), in which participants adopt a more liberal criterion when instances of a category become rare. Our results suggest that the road hazard LPE may be somewhat affected by the inherent variability of driving situations, but is still observed for highly dangerous hazards.