Learning to see: Role and teaching of perceptual skills

Abstract

Jarodzka, H. (2011, November). Learning to see: Role and teaching of perceptual skills. Invited keynote at the ICO national fall school, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.Learning to see: Role and teaching of perceptual skills Perceptual tasks, such as diagnosing medical images, classifying biological motion patterns, or interpreting air traffic control radar, require not only knowledge of facts pertinent to the domain but also perceptual skills which make it possible to visually search a complex visual stimulus for relevant information and then interpret these observations. Although the role of perceptual skills has been widely noticed to be important for perceptual tasks, little attention has been paid to the question of how to convey these perceptual skills. This talk will focus on how such skills develop with expertise and how they may be conveyed through a novel instructional method, namely Eye Movement Modelling Examples (EMME). To shed light on the visual and cognitive processes accompanying the performance of perceptual tasks, individuals from different expertise levels were compared by means of eye tracking and verbal protocols while executing corresponding tasks. Such an investigation reveals (1) the optimal approach to a given perceptual task as performed by experts, (2) difficulties novices face when performing the same task, and (3) conclusions on how to design instruction facilitating the performance of this task. Based on such task analyses, the instructional method EMME was developed to convey perceptual skills. This method, which is based on cognitive modelling and worked examples research, consists of a verbal explanation provided by a didactical expert model describing how to perform the task at hand and a video of the stimulus with the model’s eye movements superimposed onto the video. These instructional videos were provided as a next step for novices to learn from. The first empirical verifications of this method have shown that EMME can guide students’ visual attention toward relevant information, which facilitates the acquisition of perceptual skills. Moreover, students can transfer the learned skills when they are provided with novel examples, in that they show improved visual search and enhanced interpretation performance. When implementing EMME, however, the design should be carefully considered. Thus, this talk will address the issues described above as well as possible future directions for further understanding the role of perceptual skills