How to Convey Perceptual Skills by Displaying Experts’ Gaze Data

Complex tasks with a visually rich and dynamic component, like classifying locomotion patterns in moving, colorful fish, require the acquisition not only of conceptual but also of perceptual skills. In a previous study expertise differences were examined on a performance and process level by means of eye tracking and verbal protocols. It revealed that experts attended more to relevant aspects of the stimulus compared to novices and used knowledge-based shortcuts for classifying the locomotion patterns. The current study examined a method to convey perceptual skills of a didactically behaving expert to novices by means of showing them a display of the expert’s gaze data recorded while he performed the task. Results show that this type of modeling example influences visual attention and enhances performance.