Stimulus over expertise: what governs clinical visual attention in early health-vocational students
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Published on: April 11, 2025
Burcu Yuksel1, Begüm Çapa Tayyare1, Nurullah Eryilmaz2
1Kocaeli Vocational School of Health Services, Kocaeli University, Kocaeli, Türkiye.
Introduction:
Eye tracking is increasingly used to investigate how health-profession students allocate visual attention to clinically critical regions of diagnostic and therapeutic images. However, whether disciplinary training produces a perceptual advantage for images within students' own fields remains unclear. This study examined whether students preferentially attended to critical regions in images from their own discipline compared with those from an unfamiliar discipline.
Methods:
A within-stimulus 2 × 2 mixed design was employed involving 34 Medical Laboratory Techniques (MLT) students and 29 Occupational Therapy (OT) students. Participants viewed clinical images from both disciplines while their eye movements were recorded. Within each image set, own-discipline and visiting viewers were compared on attention to predefined critical regions and related fixation and timing measures. The potential predictive roles of academic standing and cognitive and learning-style variables were also examined.
Results:
No consistent own-discipline advantage was observed across the eye-tracking measures. Attention to critical regions did not favour students from the corresponding discipline in either image set, and statistically significant differences, where observed, favoured visiting rather than own-discipline viewers. In contrast, image identity consistently exerted a substantial effect on visual attention across all conditions. Neither academic standing nor cognitive or learning-style variables predicted attention to critical regions.
Discussion:
The findings challenge the assumption that enrolment in a health-profession programme necessarily confers discipline-specific perceptual expertise. Instead, visual attention appears to be influenced more strongly by stimulus characteristics than by disciplinary background at this stage of training. These results suggest that discipline-specific perceptual expertise may develop through accumulated, deliberate clinical exposure rather than through programme enrolment alone.
