Eye movement traits in differentiating experts and laymen

Abstract

There is much research indicating that eye tracking methods are a promising approach which can be used in revealing experts’ visual patterns and acquiring information regarding their subconscious behaviour while making decisions in professional tasks. The studies presented in this paper extend the aforementioned investigations and were aimed at checking the possibility of differentiating experts and laymen based on their eye movement characteristics. For this purpose, an experiment in the radiology field was chosen. The studies revealed not only significant differences between visual patterns of the analysed groups but also demonstrated that distinguishing experts from novices based on their eye movements is feasible. The classification performance was high and, dependent on the method applied for defining the test set, amounted to 85% or 93% correctly-classified subjects. The investigation concerning the possibility of recognizing who was performing the experiment task—an expert or layman—showed that dependent on the radiology image explored—the performance in the majority of cases was between 79% and 93%.