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Updated: Nov 25, 2025

Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments
Published on: January 23, 2017
On biases of attention in scientific discovery
Uriel Singer1, Kira Radinsky1, Eric Horvitz2,3
1Department of Computer Science, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3200003, Israel.
Summary:
How do nuances of scientists' attention influence what they discover? We pursue an understanding of the influences of patterns of attention on discovery with a case study about confirmations of protein-protein interactions over time. We find that modeling and accounting for attention can help us to recognize and interpret biases in large-scale and widely used databases of confirmed interactions and to better understand missing data and unknowns. Additionally, we present an analysis of how awareness of patterns of attention and use of debiasing techniques can foster earlier discoveries.
Availability And Implementation:
The data is freely available at https://github.com/urielsinger/PPI-unbias.
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