Phase-Sensitive Gaze Allocation in a Progressive Calligraphy Task

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Educational Technology

Background:

• Eye-movement studies often average gaze, masking dynamic visual information use during manual tasks.
• Understanding visual attention shifts is crucial for optimizing learning and performance in skill acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how visual information use changes across pre-writing and writing phases in Chinese calligraphy.
• To differentiate visual attention patterns in style-guided transfer (SGT) and evolution-based mapping (EBM) learning conditions.

Main Methods:

• Analyzing gaze data from 34 postgraduate students performing a fixed progressive Chinese calligraphy task.
• Separating eye-movement data into pre-writing and writing phases for SGT and EBM pages.
• Examining allocation to reference materials and diagnostic tokens/cue-plus-context displays.

Main Results:

• On SGT pages, reference allocation decreased significantly from pre-writing to writing, with increased focus on diagnostic tokens.
• On EBM pages, allocation to cue-plus-context displays substantially decreased post-pen onset but remained significant.
• Greater pre-writing context coverage in EBM was linked to higher product quality.

Conclusions:

• Pen onset serves as a critical boundary for analyzing visual information use in constrained manual production.
• External visual sampling is highest before writing, with continued task-specific re-access during execution.
• Phase-specific eye-tracking measures offer process insights without equating gaze directly with cognition.