Eye-Tracking as a Lens into Expertise Development in Visual Search

Visual search professionals frequently examine complex images in which they must locate and identify anomalies (e.g., tumors or lesions in medical images, hostile territories in maps) indicating the presence of important information. This is a difficult perceptual and cognitive challenge that requires years of experience even beyond domain-specific training. We developed a laboratory analogue of this task to examine how people development expertise over time and the changes that occur in visual scanning behaviors as this expertise accrues. Participants' eyes were tracked as they searched for subtle anomalies during and after different forms of training. Anomaly detection improved with experience and this improvement occurred more quickly in perceptual training conditions. Eye movement analyses revealed that participants' expertise conferred benefits in both scanning and recognition times. These results suggest that simple perceptual training methods can affect both cognitive and oculomotor components of visual search.