I'm very interested in the subject of expert performance. While I tend more towards dilettantism, I'm fascinated by people who can perform complex tasks or make minute discriminations seemingly effortlessly. If we can isolate the necessary skills, mental processes, and information that experts need to perform like experts, then we can get people to start behaving like experts faster.
That's the tactic taken by Robert Jacobs of the University of Rochester. A cognitive scientist, he is looking at something that is critical to how experts function, but is easy to miss -- eye movements. How a person moves his or her eyes over a scene can tell you a lot about what they know. (Some recent research has shown that implicit biases in decision making are betrayed by eye movements: the eyes will spend more time looking at information supportive of the initial decision, even if people say they're weighing all the options. Forgot the source, though...) Experts' eyes are very likely to be focusing on different things when scanning a scene compared to a novice's, and these differences can tell us what information is most important in making an expert judgment, even if the experts themselves can't.
Jacobs and colleagues took advantage of this on a recent field trip to Death Valley in California by having researchers -- both expert and novice -- wear mobile eye tracking devices. By capturing both the scenes that individuals are looking at, as well as the movements of their eyes over the scenes, they ultimately hope to develop better teaching methods that focus on perceptual skills. By teaching a person to use her senses like an expert, she may more quickly become an expert.
Since this was just a news brief in SciAm, it's a little light on details and methodology, but I'm interested in following up on this work and see how it develops.
Choi, C. (June 2010). Expert education. Scientific American, 17-18.
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