Jeremy M. Wolfe
Jeremy Wolfe is a researcher in visual attention whose Guided Search model explains how attention guides visual search. He earned psychology degrees at Princeton and MIT, then held faculty roles at MIT and Harvard Medical School. Guided Search began with a first version in 1989, received a revision in 1994, and reached version 6.0 in 2021. In 2025, he published a visual-search overview and coauthored a study on missed cancers in AI-assisted reading. As of October 2026, he is professor of radiology and ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and principal investigator of the Visual Attention Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
- Now at
- Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham
- Works
- 780
- Citations
- 30,557
- h-index
- 80
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Timeline
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1977–1981
Training in psychology
He earns an A.B. in psychology from Princeton in 1977 and a PhD in psychology from MIT in 1981.
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1981–2002
From MIT to Harvard
At MIT, he holds faculty roles from 1981 to 1991 and becomes associate professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 1987. From 1991 to 2002, he serves as associate professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School.
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1989–1994
The Guided Search model
He develops Guided Search, whose first version appears in 1989. In 1994, he revises the model as Guided Search 2.0.
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2019
American Academy election
He is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
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2021
Guided Search 6.0
In 2021, he publishes Guided Search 6.0, which combines top-down and bottom-up features, prior history, reward, and scene semantics in a spatial priority map for attention.
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2025
Visual search overview
In 2025, he publishes “Visual Search,” an overview that explains how selective attention lets people process some visual input more fully under bottom-up and top-down influences.
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2025
AI and mammography
In 2025, he coauthors a conference study asking whether concurrent reading with AI leads to more false-negative errors for cancers that AI does not mark.
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As of October 2026
Professor and principal investigator
As of October 2026, he is professor of radiology and ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and principal investigator of the Visual Attention Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In 2026, he coauthors “Biasmapping,” a study of idiosyncratic covert search near fixation.
Sources and credits
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