Abstract
The results of two experiments are analyzed to find out how artistic expertise influences visual search. Experiment I comprised survey data of 1,065 students on self-reported visual memory skills and their ability to find three targets in four images of artwork. Experiment II comprised eye movement data of 50 Visual Literacy (VL) experts and non-experts whose eye movements during visual search were analyzed for nine images of artwork as an external validation of the assessment tasks performed in Sample I. No time constraint was set for completion of the visual search task. A latent profile analysis revealed four typical solution patterns for the students in Sample I, including a mainstream group, a group that completes easy images fast and difficult images slowly, a fast and erroneous group, and a slow working student group, depending on task completion time and on the probability of finding all three targets. Eidetic memory, performance in art education and visual imagination as self-reported visual skills have significant impact on latent class membership probability. We present a hidden Markov model (HMM) approach to uncover underlying regions of attraction that result from visual search eye-movement behavior in Experiment II. VL experts and non-experts did not significantly differ in task time and number of targets found but they did differ in their visual search process: compared to non-experts, experts showed greater precision in fixating specific prime and target regions, assessed through hidden state fixation overlap. Exploratory analysis of HMMs revealed differences between experts and non-experts in image locations of attraction (HMM states). Experts seem to focus their attention on smaller image parts whereas non-experts used wider parts of the image during their search. Differences between experts and non-experts depend on the relative saliency of targets embedded in images. HMMs can determine the effect of expertise on exploratory eye movements executed during visual search tasks. Further research on HMMs and art expertise is required to confirm exploratory results.
Highlights
Visual perception is an active process of constructing meaningful information from external visual stimuli based both on neurobiological capacities and individual learning history
This study investigated Visual Literacy (VL) expert and non-expert visual search behavior
Previously not taken into account by pre-defined AOI were outlined in greater clarity among VL experts
Summary
Visual perception is an active process of constructing meaningful information from external visual stimuli based both on neurobiological capacities (i.e., laws of perception) and individual learning history (skill training, memory). Perceptual psychology describes the cognitive mechanisms employed to transform visual stimuli into information. The comparison of experts’ and nonexperts’ processing during a challenging visual task can be used to decipher these cognitive mechanisms. Visual expertise has been studied in medicine (medical imaging), engineering (surveillance of technical processes) or education (learning behavior) and has been defined as a domain-specific adaptation to the requirements of a visually challenging task (Gegenfurtner and van Merriënboer, 2017), which has been coined Visual Literacy (VL). Mostly from authors in the context of aesthetics and fine arts, this concept has been referred to as visual competency (Schönau and Kárpáti, 2019). Other authors (Avgerinou and Pettersson, 2011; Wagner and Schönau, 2016) used the term VL, which they described as the ability to inspect and understand images and express oneself through visual media
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