There's supposedly a study (I saw someone mention it in a Youtube video) where some unspecified military needed to find hidden tanks when looking at a battlefield. There were two people who were much better at this than everyone else, so there was a study done on how they did it, and they wrote an in-depth report on their methods. But eye tracking software showed they were actually doing it a totally different way from their description. The lesson being that people don't always consciously know how they perform a particular cognitive task.
I cannot find any original source for this. Resolves YES if anyone provides me one, NO at close if no one does, N/A if I manage to find it myself.
Intermediate sources (like someone else repeating the story without saying where they got it) are not sufficient to resolve YES but would certainly be useful clues, so please share any you know of.
Update 2025-06-23 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has specified that to resolve YES, the source must contain all of the story's key elements. In response to a suggested study, the creator confirmed that while it had tank-spotting and eye-tracking, it was insufficient because it was missing the other distinguishing characteristics mentioned in the description. These are:
The story must be about two specific individuals who were exceptionally good at the task.
There must be a conflict between their self-reported method and what eye-tracking revealed about their actual process.
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Is it this study? https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA061580.pdf
Per the study, "Yet, the eye fixations indicated that there was a spread of only a few seconds between the actual visual detections of the targets. The large differences in recorded detection times seemed to be due to each individual's decision making process as shown by the amount of time they spent fixating on the target before reporting the detection."
@Qoiuoiuoiu Interesting, but doesn't look like it to me. Mentions tank-spotting and eye-tracking software, but doesn't have either of the other two distinguishing characteristics.
I only had the patience to read the first 40 pages, so maybe the relevant part is further down. Might read the rest later.
@IsaacKing My AI gen summary mentioned that individuals thought they spotted the tanks faster, but in reality the difference was in speed of reporting. Idk if it's actually in the paper, I read through some of it but there's a ton of stuff there.
@Qoiuoiuoiu isn't it possible someone is misinterpreting the paper having heard it second hand ? Kinda hard to verify but this seems close