Abstract
Visual expertise is a fundamental proficiency in many vocations and many questions have risen on the topic, with studies looking at experts and novices differences’ in observation (e.g., radiologists) or at ways to help novices achieve visual expertise (e.g., through annotations). However, most of these studies focus on white-collar professions and overlook vocational ones. For example, observing is uttermost important for fashion designers who spend most of their professional time on visual tasks related to creating patterns and garments or performing alterations. Therefore, this study focuses on trying to convey a professional way to look at images by exposing apprentices to images annotated (e.g., circles) by experts and identifying if their gaze (e.g., fixation durations and gaze coverage) and verbalisations (i.e., images descriptions) are affected. The study was conducted with 38 apprentices that were exposed to sequential sets of images depicting shirts, first non-annotated (pre-test), then annotated for the experimental group and non-annotated for the control group (training 1 and training 2), and finally non-annotated (post-test). Also, in the pre and post-test and in training 2 apprentices had to verbally describe each image. Gaze was recorded with the Tobii X2–60 tracker. Results for fixation durations showed that the experimental group looked longer in the annotated part of the shirt in training 1 and in the shirt’s central part at post-test. However, the experimental group did not cover a significantly larger area of the shirt compared to control and verbalisations show no difference between the groups at post-test.
Highlights
The professional world is in constant evolution and, inevitably, the field of education must remain up-to-date by attempting to prepare students for a hyper-specialised and technology-driven world
This paper aims to address the above-mentioned research gap by investigating how visual expertise can be fostered in apprentice fashion designers
A series of GLMMs were conducted to identify the effects of presence of annotations on fixation durations on the Areas of Interest (AOIs) for training 1 and training 2
Summary
The professional world is in constant evolution and, inevitably, the field of education must remain up-to-date by attempting to prepare students for a hyper-specialised and technology-driven world. From a more cognitive perspective, it can be viewed as a set of visual skills that are specific to each task and domain and require interaction between perceptual and cognitive skills (Ravesloot et al, 2012). The importance of visual expertise makes it a topic that is studied in numerous contexts, such as medicine (Naghshineh et al, 2008), architecture (Styhre & Gluch, 2009), and sports (Kredel et al, 2017) Most of these studies focus on understanding the differences between experts and novices, either to distinguish where they focus their attention while looking at professional material or investigate how to improve observation skills of novices. The strategy is often to redirect novices’ attention using annotations (or signals or cues) in the form of arrows, text, audio, colours, etc. (Schneider et al, 2018)
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