Eye movements during music reading: Toward a unified understanding of visual expertise

Abstract

Abstract Eye tracking methodology has been extensively used to document the remarkable perceptual skill of experts in many different domains, including chess, medicine, and face perception. To facilitate an integrative understanding of visual expertise and eye movements, our chapter provides a selective review of the music reading and eye tracking literature. We specifically focus on exploring the extent to which music reading experts use parafoveal processing to a greater extent than novices. Theoretical perspectives in the chess literature, including chunking (Chase & Simon, 1973a, 1973b) and template theories (Gobet & Simon, 1996, 2000), assume that experts learn to process domain-specific visual features as larger patterns, which implies that experts should engage in more parafoveal and/or peripheral visual processing to integrate information across larger regions of the image. In line with this prediction, we conclude here that music reading experts appear to also engage in more parafoveal processing than novices, as indicated by a variety of eye tracking measures, including eye-hand span (EHS) and perceptual span (i.e., visual span) measurements. We also illustrate how variations in task demands, including tempo and complexity, can impact the nature of the link between expertise and parafoveal processing. We conclude that music reading and eye tracking paradigms could be further utilized to study the generalizability of key findings in the visual expertise literature, and we identify some potentially promising directions for future work.