Eye movements reflect expertise development in hybrid search

Domain-specific expertise changes the way people perceive, process, and remember information from that domain. This is often observed in visual domains involving skilled searches, such as athletics referees, or professional visual searchers (e.g., security and medical screeners). Although existing research has compared expert to novice performance in visual search, little work has directly documented how accumulating experiences change behavior. A longitudinal approach to studying visual search performance may permit a finer-grained understanding of experience-dependent changes in visual scanning, and the extent to which various cognitive processes are affected by experience. In this study, participants acquired experience by taking part in many experimental sessions over the course of an academic semester. Searchers looked for 20 categories of targets simultaneously (which appeared with unequal frequency), in displays with 0-3 targets present, while having their eye movements recorded. With experience, accuracy increased and response times decreased. Fixation probabilities and durations decreased with increasing experience, but saccade amplitudes and visual span increased. These findings suggest that the behavioral benefits endowed by expertise emerge from oculomotor behaviors that reflect enhanced reliance on memory to guide attention and the ability to process more of the visual field within individual fixations.

Automated summary

Domain-specific expertise influences how information is perceived, processed, and remembered, particularly in visual search tasks. Accumulating experiences lead to changes in behavior, with experts showing improved accuracy and faster response times. Changes in eye movements reflect the behavioral benefits associated with expertise.