Fostering perceptual skills in medical diagnosis

Abstract

Perceptually demanding tasks, like diagnosing seizures based on patient video cases, not only require the acquisition of conceptual but also of perceptual skills; like visually searching and interpreting relevant features. Showing the eye movements of a didactically behaving expert conveyed perceptual skills in a perceptually demanding, but conceptually simple task. The current study applied this method to medical education – a conceptually complex task – by example videos, which were verbally explained by an expert. In addition the experimental groups saw a display of the expert's eye movements recorded, while he performed the task. Results show that blurring non-attended areas of the expert guides the attention of the students during example study, leads to enhanced visual search and interpretation of relevant features in contrast to displaying attended areas as a circle and to a control group without attention guidance. Thus, spotlight attention guidance fosters learning of perceptual skills in medical diagnosis.