Expertise effects on attention and eye-movement control during visual search: Evidence from the domain of music reading.

Abstract

Experts in many domains use their domain-specific knowledge to rapidly locate relevant information. To explore this ability in music reading, we contrasted the eye movements of 30 expert musicians (with at least 10 years of music reading training) and 30 non-musicians (who could not read music) while they completed a visual search task that required them to match a section of a complex piano music score (i.e., the search template) to its identical counterpart within a larger music score (i.e., the search array). Critically, both the search template and array were presented simultaneously throughout each trial in the experiment, which allowed for visual comparisons between the search template and the array. Relative to the non-musicians, the experts had higher accuracy and also spent more time looking at the relevant regions and less time looking at irrelevant regions. Also, as evidence that the experts and non-musicians adopted qualitatively different search strategies, the experts spent more time than non-musicians looking at the search template at the beginning of the trial, and the experts returned to this region less often than non-musicians. Taken together, our results indicate that experts use domain-specific knowledge in the form of "chunks" (Chase & Simon, 1973a, 1973b) and "templates" (Gobet & Simon, 1996b, 2000) to acquire accurate representations of highly complex search templates.