Abstract
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.
Highlights
Domain-specific expertise changes the way people perceive, process, and remember information from that domain
Significance statement We examined the development of expertise in a longitudinal visual search study, measuring how experience changes individual performance and gaze behaviors
For each participant, performance on all dependent variables was baseline-corrected relative to that participant’s own mean performance across all sessions. This allowed us to examine the development of search expertise regardless of individual differences in performance, as reflected in the percentage change in performance over time
Summary
Across many domains and sensory modalities, expertise confers perceptual and cognitive benefits. In a recent meta-analysis of search expertise, Brams et al (2019) described many behavioral skills that differentiate experts from novices, and the cognitive and oculomotor variables that should reflect these differences across the different phases of individual search tasks. We used a relatively longitudinal approach to investigate expertise, such that each participant served as both a novice and, later, a skilled searcher with expert-level performance. Using this approach allowed us track changes to behavioral, cognitive, and oculomotor skills as expertise develops, rather than using between-group comparisons, which may be susceptible to individual-difference variations. By adopting a longitudinal approach, we were able to measure the behavioral (accuracy and response time), cognitive (decision time), and oculomotor (visits, dwell times, FVF, saccade amplitudes) measures that change as expertise develops
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