Cue usage in volleyball : a time course comparison of elite, intermediate and novice female players

This study compared visual search strategies in adult female volleyball players of three levels. Video clips of the attack of the opponent team were presented on a large screen and participants reacted to the final pass before the spike. Reaction time, response accuracy and eye movement patterns were measured. Elite players had the highest response accuracy (97.50 ± 3.5%) compared to the intermediate (91.50 ± 4.7%) and novice players (83.50 ± 17.6%; p<0.05). Novices had a remarkably high range of reaction time but no significant differences were found in comparison to the reaction time of elite and intermediate players. In general, the three groups showed similar gaze behaviour with the apparent use of visual pivots at moments of reception and final pass. This confirms the holistic model of image perception for volleyball and suggests that expert players extract more information from parafoveal regions

Looking for cancer: Expertise related differences in searching and decision making

We examined how the ability to detect lung nodules in chest x-ray inspection is reflected in experience-related differences in visual search and decision making, and whether the eye-tracking metric time-to-first hit showed systematic decreases across expertise levels are examined. In the study decision making improved with expertise, however, time-to-first fixate a nodule showed only a non-significant trend to decrease with expertise. Surprisingly, naïve and expert observers allocated less visual attention at nodules compared with first and third year radiography students. This similarity in visual attention at nodules but not in decision making was explained by the fact that naïve observers were more likely to fixate and make errors on distracter regions. Time-to-first hit has been linked to expert performance in mammography, but in this study was not sufficiently sensitive to demonstrate clear linear improvements across expertise groups. This brings into question the use of this metric as an indirect measure of rapid initial holistic processing

Task-dependent eye-movement patterns in viewing art

In art schools and classes for art history students are trained to pay attention to different aspects of an artwork, such as art movement characteristics and painting techniques. Experts are better at processing style and visual features of an artwork than nonprofessionals. Here we tested the hypothesis that experts in art use different, task-dependent viewing strategies than nonprofessionals when analyzing a piece of art. We compared a group of art history students with a group of students with no art education background, while viewing 36 paintings under three discrimination tasks. Participants were asked to determine the art movement, the date and the medium of the paintings. We analyzed behavioral and eye-movement data of 27 participants. Our observers adjusted their viewing strategies according to the task, resulting in longer fixation durations and shorter saccade amplitudes for the medium detection task. We found higher task accuracy and subjective confidence, less congruence and higher dispersion in fixation locations in experts. Expertise also influenced saccade metrics, biasing it towards larger saccade amplitudes, advocating a more holistic scanning strategy of experts in all three tasks

Emotion recognition from music-induced movement

Emotions color all aspects of our interaction with music. Not only composing music or playing a musical instrument, but also perceiving sounds and responding to them implicates the involvement of human emotions. An interesting type of musical interaction, in particular with regard to emotion research, is dance, which is believed to facilitate the expression of several different emotions in a non-verbal way. In this study, the aim was to examine emotion perception from dance movement. Thirty participants observed a selection of silent videos showing depersonalized avatars of dancers moving to an emotionally neutral musical stimulus after emotions of either sadness or happiness had been induced. After every film clip, the participants were asked to assess the emotional state of the dancer. Results revealed that the emotional state of the dancers was successfully identified. In addition, emotions were more often recognized for female dancers than for their male counterparts. Finally, results of eye tracking measurements showed that observers primarily focused on movements of the trunk when decoding emotional information from dance. The findings of this study show that induced emotions can be successfully recognized from dance movement. They also illustrate the significance of emotions in the coupling between music perception, cognition, and action

A Science Education Study Using Visual Cognition and Eye Tracking to Explore Medication Selection in the Novice Versus Expert Nurse Anesthetist

The purpose of this science education study is to explore visual cognition and eye tracking during medication selection in the student nurse anesthetist (first year and second year students) and the expert nurse anesthetist. The first phase of this study consisted of the selection of a specific medication (target) from an array of medications via computer simulation. Various dependent variables were recorded to examine performance (reaction time and accuracy), and the allocation of visual attention was measured with eye tracking (dwell proportion, verification, and guidance). The second phase of this study included the administration of a demographic and post experiment questionnaire to capture additional quantitative and qualitative data. Results demonstrate that similar distractors attract attention during search as evidenced by longer reaction times when similar distractors are present, most significantly in expert participants. Additionally, all participants spent a greater amount of time looking at the similar distractor as compared to randomly chosen non-similar distractors when a similar distractor was present. However, the presence of similar distractors in target present trials increased performance in experts, decreased performance in second year students, and had no effect on first year students’ performance. Expertise effects were further demonstrated, as expert participants were significantly slower than both first and second years during target verification. The post experiment questionnaire included both open-ended and close-ended questions, to allow for themes to emerge related the participants’ beliefs related to visual search and medication selection. The results reinforced the eye tracking results reported above, with most participants identifying “color” and “medication label” as the most difficult medication features to distinguish during visual search. Additionally, the majority of participants who responded they had committed a medication error, identified “similarity” as the most common factor that led to the medication error