Expert-Novice Eye tracking in Gross Anatomy

This pioneering study explored the eye movement classifications among expert and novice anatomists in a gross anatomy cadaver lab. Participants wore eye-tracking glasses while identifying tagged anatomical structures in a prosected donor body. As expected, our initial findings indicated that participants with greater expertise had shorter completion times. Also, the normalized fixation features of participants showed that as expertise levels increased, there were fewer fixations with shorter durations. This suggests that participants with greater expertise employed distinctive visual attention strategies. We navigated several challenges related to the authentic environment, highlighting the need to explore further improving methodological and data analysis techniques. These preliminary findings have implications for informing pedagogical approaches leveraging digitization without sacrificing the 3D environment.