The very first principle about finding lost golf balls is that they are almost always in the rough. It is my contention that those most likely to be able to find golf balls are painters. It don't mean industrial painters, but those who can paint images in a painterly fashion. Such people are more likely to be able to distinguish small out of place blobs or pin pricks in an otherwise neat and tidy landscape. They will be able to find balls in fog, in the wet, in muck, in ponds and in tall grass along streams.
This is because the eye composition of painterly people has more rods than cones. Having more cones enables one to see colours better and to find extremely tiny discrepancies in a landscape or a painting. Having more rods helps one to see things more quickly and possibly crisper or less blurred, since rods hit on the location of things more quickly. You now see why painterly is better. This is because the artist or painterly person is also looking for a way to make the image something that hangs together in a meaningful way, an expression of originality. Such a person will see the ball as an anomaly, and be able to pin point its location as being in the place where something looks like a ball or looks a little anomalous. The downside of being painterly may be that one needs more rods than cones to be a good golfer, since golfing may require seeing something very small and not blurred out of the corner of one's eye when one is in full swing.
You will have guessed that a good eye doctor will be able to tell you whether or not you will be good at finding golf balls, were eyesight the only thing that you needed. In my view, the most valuable asset to finding golf balls is being a novice at golf or being really unskilled. Such people will find golf balls where they hit them. They need only to remember that after one hits a ball, one must never take one's eye off the last place that one expects to find the ball. Last being the operative word here!
If a ball flies into a place that is very uncomfortable, such as a brier patch, or a place of poison ivy or stinging nettles, or a place that is wet, or on the side of a steep cliff, it will more difficult to find. Such places can be expected to hide more golf balls. It is advisable to carry a very fast high definition digital camera with one and as soon as the ball is about to disappear from sight, one takes a picture. Lining up with the point of disappearance and walking in a dead straight line, one can simulate the direction of an errant golf ball. One should always have a long pole scooper with one when playing golf. This allows one to scoop a ball from one side of a stream to the other, from within a thick gorse bush, from a pond or stream, or from a sand pit that is full of water.
My advice to one that wishes to find gold balls as well as I do, is to eat lots of cooked carrots on a regular basis. Cooked carrots are best because the cooking releases the good stuff for your eyesight in the carrots. Eating raw carrots gives you enzymes which may or may not help you, but it certainly means that you won't eat as many carrots. Another thing that you can do is to drink a glass of carrot juice every morning. This not only helps your eyesight, but may also help you to live longer.
If a ball flies into an area of long grass, such as a rough, or a place with snakes, or things that bite, it will be more difficult to find. In England and Scotland there is a bush called a gorse. These are prickly bushes that will almost always contain a few lost balls. Many of the balls will not be visible even if one makes one's way into the center of the gorse.