The Flash-Preview Moving Window Paradigm: Unpacking Visual Expertise One Glimpse at a Time

Abstract

How we make sense of what we see and where best to look is shaped by our experience, our current task goals and how we first perceive our environment. An established way of demonstrating these factors work together is to study how eye movement patterns change as a function of expertise and to observe how experts can solve complex tasks after only very brief glances at a domain-specific image. The primary focus of this paper is to introduce an innovative gaze-contingent method called the 'Flash-Preview Moving Window' (FPMW) paradigm (Castelhano & Henderson, 2007), which was recently developed to understand our shared expertise in scene perception and how our first glimpse of a scene is used to guide our eye movement behaviour. In keeping with this special issue on visual expertise and medicine, this paper will highlight how the FPMW paradigm has the potential to resolve long-standing theoretical issues as to how, right from the very first glance, experts are able to process domain-specific images and guide their eye movements better than novices. Since FPMW is a gaze-contingent eye-tracking method, the paper will first outline the current methodological and theoretical frontier, and how the FPMW paradigm bridges established methods used to investigate visual expertise. The paper will discuss a recent example in which the FPMW was employed to investigate medical image perception expertise for the first time (Litchfield & Donovan, 2016), and by discussing the insights and challenges this method offers, this should ultimately deepen our understanding of visual expertise.

Unboxing the Black Box of Visual Expertise in Medicine

“…This activated illness-script would already guide the expert in his or her subsequent visual search on the medical image. Interestingly, Litchfield and Donovan (2017) did something in this direction within their third experiment, by showing the target word to the participant right before the flash-preview. It would be very informative for further theoretical developments to extend this approach, by using realistic patient data.…”

“…The manuscript by Litchfield and Donovan (2017) presents the 'moving window paradigm' to investigate visual expertise. McConkie and Rayner (1975) introduced this paradigm to investigate the socalled perceptual span in reading.…”

“…Typically, in such 'scene perception' settings, researchers use a Gausian blurring technique to capture the size of the perceptual span (i.e., the image is blurred apart from a certain area around the current fixation point). The "flash preview moving window paradigm" (Litchfield & Donovan, 2017) shows an alternative solution. It combines a method of providing participants only with a short glimpse of an image ('flash preview': Kundel & Nodine, 1975) and the above described 'moving window paradigm'.…”

Methodologies for Studying Visual Expertise

“…Szulewski et al (2017) focus on pupillometry. Litchfield and Donovan (2017) reflect on the benefits of the flash-preview moving window paradigm. And Helle (2017) explores how eye tracking and verbal report data can be combined.…”

“…Each article is devoted to one approach (or to a combination of approaches) and discusses its affordances and constraints for empirically analyzing visual expertise. These approaches are: cognitive-neurosciences (Gegenfurtner et al, 2017b), receiver operating characteristics analysis (Krupsinki, 2017), eye tracking (Fox & Faulkner-Jones, 2017), pupillometry (Szulewski, Kelton, & Howes, 2017), the flash-preview moving window paradigm (Litchfield & Donovan, 2017), the combination of eye tracking data and verbal report data (Helle, 2017), the use of interviews and verbal protocols (Van de Wiel, 2017), ethnomethodology (Ivarsson, 2017), and the expert performance approach (Williams, Fawyer, & Hodges, 2017). The special issue closes with two commentaries (Boucheix, 2017;Jarodzka & Boshuizen, 2017).…”