id_1006. TESTING THE POTENTIAL OF READING TIME FROM AN ANALOGUE CLOCK AS A MODEL OF VISUAL EXPERTISE
Magdalena Miśkowiec1, Marcin Furtak2, Anna Rachowicz1, Marek A. Pedziwiatr1
1 Jagiellonian University, Centre for Brain Research, ul. Kopernika 50, Kraków, Poland
2 Osnabrück University, Institute of Cognitive Science, Wachsbleiche 27, Osnabrück, Germany
INTRODUCTION: Studying visual expertise — that is, the proficiency in various vision-related domains — poses significant methodological challenges. In some domains, the population of experts is small (e.g. in chess). Other domains, such as face perception, are characterised by a limited variability in the level of expertise found in non-clinical populations. Laboratory studies involving training participants to become experts in novel domains are, in turn, time-consuming and offer limited ecological validity.
AIM(S): Here, we explore if reading time from an analogue clock has the potential to be a model for studying visual expertise that does not require overcoming the above-mentioned challenges and possesses other desired properties: the ability to perform this task likely varies naturally across the general population, which should allow for conducting ecologically valid studies in large, varied samples.
METHOD(S): To test whether clock reading is indeed a good model for visual expertise research, we are currently conducting an eye-tracking experiment including two tasks: a time-telling task, in which participants report the time displayed on a clock, and a parity task, in which they report whether a cued number on a clock face is odd or even. Importantly, this number can be either the number expected at the given position or not.
RESULTS: We hypothesize that experts (individuals with a higher performance in the time telling-task), as compared to non-experts, will exhibit 1) more pronounced oculomotor hallmarks of visual expertise (e.g. shorter fixation durations and more selective attention allocation) and 2) impaired performance in the parity task resulting from greater difficulty in processing the numbers they do not expect. The data collection is still ongoing.
CONCLUSIONS: Nevertheless, our study has the potential to test if reading time from an analogue clock constitutes a useful model of visual expertise, facilitating further investigation of this phenomenon.
FINANCIAL SUPPORT: This research was funded by a grant from the National Science Centre, Poland (2024/55/D/HS6/02157) awarded to the author M.P.