book (Green and Swets 1966). Meanwhile, Tanner mentored a series of exceptional graduate students at Michigan. All were introduced by Licklider to the Acoustical Society of America where they enjoyed a feverishly intense venue for discussion of their ideas at biannual meetings and in the Society’s journal. Another factor was the active collaboration with Tanner of James P. Egan and his students at Indiana University.
8. Extensions Of SDT In Psychology
Egan recognized the potential for applying SDT in psychology beyond the traditional psychophysical tasks. He extended it to the less tightly deﬁned vigilance task, that is, the practical military and industrial observing task of ‘low-probability watch’ (Egan et al. 1961–see Swets 1964, Chap. 15), and also to speech communication (Egan and Clarke 1957–see Swets 1964, Chap. 30). He also brought SDT to purely cognitive tasks with experiments in recognition memory (see Green and Swets 1966, Sect. 12.9). Applications were then made by others to those tasks, and also to tasks of conceptual judgment, animal discrimination and learning, word recognition, attention, visual imagery, manual control, and reaction time (see Swets 1996, Chap. 1). A broad sample of empirical ROCs obtained in these areas indicates their very similar forms (Swets 1996, Chap. 2). An Annual Review chapter reviews applications in clinical psychology, for example, to predicting acts of violence (McFall and Treat 1999).
9. Applications In Diagnostics
An analysis of performance measurement in information retrieval suggested that two-by-two contingency tables for any diagnostic task were grist for SDT’s mill (Swets 1996, Chap. 9). This idea was advanced considerably by Lusted’s (1968) application to medical diagnosis. A standard protocol for evaluating diagnostic performance via SDT methods, with an emphasis on medical images, was sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (Swets and Pickett 1982). By 2000, ‘ROC’ is speciﬁed as a key word in over 1000 medical articles each year, ranging from radiology to blood analysis. Other diagnostic applications are being made to aptitude testing, materials testing, weather forecasting, and polygraph lie detection (Swets 1996, Chap. 4).
A recent development is to use SDT to improve, as well as to evaluate, diagnostic accuracy. Observers’ ratings of the relevant dimensions of a diagnostic task—e.g., perceptual features in an X-ray—are merged in a manner speciﬁed by the theory to yield an optimal estimate of the probability that a ‘signal’ is present (Swets 1996, Chap. 8). The latest work both in psychology and diagnostics has been described didactically (Swets 1998).
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