Eye movements during music reading: Toward a unified understanding of visual expertise

Music reading expertise affects visual change detection: Evidence from a music-related flicker paradigm

“…Consequently, the larger saccade amplitudes for experts than non-musicians in our study imply that the experts in our study might have a larger visual span, which is consistent with chunking and template theory. "Chunks" and "templates" could potentially enable music experts to engage in more parafoveal processing than novices (for a related discussion, see Sheridan et al, 2020). More generally, experts in many different domains have also shown enhanced parafoveal and/or peripheral processing of domain-specific stimuli relative to novices, including face perception (e.g., Richler & Gauthier, 2014), chess (e.g., Reingold & Sheridan, 2011), text reading (e.g., Rayner & Pollatsek, 1997; for reviews, see Rayner, 1998Rayner, , 2009Schotter et al, 2012), and medical image perception (e.g., Drew et al, 2013;Krupinski et al, 2006;Sheridan & Reingold, 2017).…”

“…The present study's task helps to fill this gap in the expertise literature because it is accessible to non-musicians. By using a non-performance task, which did not require the musicians to perform the music or play an instrument, we minimised the impact of possible performance-related confounds that were present in prior music reading studies, including differences in tempo (i.e., the speed of the performance) and motor processing across the complex and simple conditions (for additional discussion, see Sheridan et al, 2020). At the same time, this task also used ecologically valid stimuli (i.e., images of music scores), and was complex and challenging for both groups of participants as indicated by the long absolute RT values (which averaged approximately 15-23 s in the complex condition).…”

“…However, several other studies have also documented the opposite effect (e.g., Polanka, 1995), or no difference between conditions (e.g., Waters & Underwood, 1998). As reviewed by Sheridan et al (2020), the variation in the pattern of complexity effects across studies could stem from differences in task demands, given that a wide range of tasks have been used in previous music reading studies. For example, during Maturi and Sheridan's (2020) musicrelated visual search task (in which participants were asked to search for specific bars of music), it is possible that increases in visual complexity facilitated performance because complex (compared with simple) target bars of music might be less visually similar to other bars, and therefore easier to differentiate from non-target bars (for a related discussion, see Sheridan et al, 2020).…”

Does cognitive load differ among sight-singers? An exploratory study using pupillometry and interviews

“…Also, Arthur et al (2020) found that sight-reading expertsthose able to play a 6 th Grade sight-reading exercise from the Australian Examination Board-were more likely to have had formal training for more than 10 years and to have begun learning music before the age of seven. One possible explanation is that experienced musicians can access schemas from their long-term memory and, therefore, process the score more easily (Sheridan et al, 2020). The amount of previous musical experience is also related to better sight-singing performance (Fournier, 2020).…”

The association of eye movements and performance accuracy in a novel sight-reading task

“…Besides practice, musical expertise was also found to be associated with a more accurate sight-reading performance ( 6 ; 7 ; 14 ; 18 ) and with changes in eye movements ( 2 ; 18 ; 38 ; for a review see Sheridan, Maturi, & Kleinsmith, 47 ). Gilman and Underwood ( 17 ) asked participants of varying expertise to perform three types of tasks, namely a sight-reading task, a transposition task, and an error detection task.…”