Casual smartphone scanning game Airport Scanner is helping psychologists work out why we miss things
Was that a gun?
Smartphone gaming isn't just good for relaxing after a hard day at the metaphorical coal face. It can also be used by science to prove things. Scientifically.
Cognitive psychologists from Duke University in North Carolina have used data collected from casual smartphone spot-'em-up Airport Scanner in a study into people's ability to identify rare items.
And the conclusion they've come to? We're all pretty rubbish at it.
The rarer the item, the less likely we are to see it when it does pop up. Of the rarest 30 items looked at, which only cropped up in 0.15 percent of games, players noticed them just 27 per cent of the time.
Compare that with items that turned up more than 1 percent of the time, which were successfully identified 92 percent of the time.
These results may not just have an impact on airport security, by the way. You see, rare early signs of cancer have similar appearance rates to the super-rare items in the game.
The study was based on data collected between December 2012 and March 2013, during which players performed more than 20 million digital suitcase scans.
But there's much more data to sift through, with players now having performed 1.5 billion pretend searches.
Wired