Scientists Track Experts’ Eyes to Teach Novices How to See

The eyes of an expert radiologist, a fighter pilot, or an elite athlete do not simply look at the world the way everyone else’s do. They sweep, lock, and linger according to strategies built over years of practice, and for most of history that perceptual mastery has been impossible to teach directly. Now a systematic review published in the journal Trends in Psychology argues that eye-tracking technology is changing that, offering a way to record where experts direct their gaze, play those visual patterns back to novices, and measurably accelerate the learning of complex skills. The review, conducted by Elena Lupia, Alessandro Bortolotti, and Riccardo Palumbo at the University G. d’Annunzio of Chieti-Pescara in Italy, consolidates the growing body of evidence that expert gaze is not just a byproduct of mastery but a transferable component of it.

The scientific foundation for this work rests on well-established theories of expertise. The information-reduction hypothesis holds that experts become efficient by discarding irrelevant visual information and concentrating on the crucial elements of a task. The theory of long-term working memory suggests that mastery extends processing capacity by building retrieval structures that let experts access vast stores of knowledge quickly. Meanwhile, the holistic model of image perception, developed from mammography research, proposes that experts gather information from broad and peripheral areas of the visual field, effectively widening their useful field of view. Decades of eye-tracking studies have backed these ideas: as professionals gain experience, they visit objects less frequently, spend less time viewing them, avoid distractors more reliably, and show evidence of an expanding visual span.

What makes the new review distinctive is its focus on turning those expert differences into training tools. The authors systematically searched the Scopus database following PRISMA guidelines, screening 79 initially identified articles down to a final sample of eight studies that either examined expertise-dependent differences in eye movements or tested the transfer of skills through gaze patterns. Their conceptual framework divided the field into three elements: the skill-transfer methods and cognitive phenomena involved, the macro application areas where eye movements serve as training tools, and the eye-tracking metrics used to measure both expertise and learning. The framework captures how techniques such as eye movement modeling examples, or EMMEs, record an expert’s gaze as the expert performs a task, then present the playback to learners alongside the expert’s verbal narration.

EMMEs are theoretically rooted in observational learning and in the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, and they draw on a striking discovery in cognitive neuroscience: the brain’s mirror system activates when a person watches another perform an action, simulating that action internally. Research on expert dancers has shown that this mirroring process can help integrate observed actions into the observer’s own behavioral repertoire. In practical studies, the technique has delivered real gains. Novice aircraft inspectors trained with expert gaze displays detected more faults during search tasks, and EMME-trained inspectors of circuit boards showed improved fault detection. Even programmers using expert gaze cues debugged software more quickly, suggesting the approach extends well beyond medicine and industry.

Medicine, and especially surgery, has become the proving ground for gaze-based training. In a randomized controlled trial, novice surgeons trained to follow expert-like gaze strategies on a laparoscopic simulator developed more target-locking fixations, completed tasks faster, and made fewer errors than peers who learned by discovery alone. The advantage became even more pronounced when participants had to multitask, hinting that trained gaze frees cognitive resources for other demands. Related work on quiet eye training, a technique that extends the final fixation before a critical movement, showed that trainees who practiced knot-tying with gaze training maintained their performance under heightened anxiety while traditionally trained peers faltered. Collaborative systems that displayed a supervisor’s live gaze to trainees reduced completion times and errors, and studies of visual guidance during laparoscopic tasks found better trainee performance when experts’ point of gaze was made visible.

The applications reach far beyond the operating room. In a maritime operation simulator, researchers built expert-derived attention maps that told trainees exactly where to focus during heavy lifting operations; the briefed group showed superior visual focus compared with a control group told only about the risks. In construction, eye-tracking studies revealed that workers who scanned the workplace more broadly recognized a higher proportion of hazards, and that personalized feedback based on eye movement data improved both search patterns and hazard recognition. In aviation, researchers comparing helicopter pilots of different experience levels during landing simulation found that veterans relied more heavily on cockpit instruments while novices looked out the window, and that eye-tracking feedback improved the transfer of skills from simulator to real flight.

Not every finding supported the enthusiasm. Studies of EMMEs in school settings produced mixed results. One experiment found that students who watched a model’s gaze replay while reading illustrated texts integrated verbal and graphical information more effectively, and that weaker readers benefited most. But another pair of experiments on procedural problem-solving in geometry found no significant advantage from displaying a model’s eye movements, and in one case the modeled gaze actually slowed transfer problem-solving. The authors of the review conclude that the nature of the task is a critical moderator: gaze modeling appears most effective for non-procedural tasks such as classification and strategy learning, where the expert simply observes the material, and least effective for procedural tasks requiring direct interaction with on-screen objects, which already capture attention naturally.

The review also flags subtler moderators. Prior knowledge matters, consistent with the expertise reversal effect, which holds that extra instructional guidance can burden learners who already know enough to proceed without it. The presence of verbal explanations alongside gaze overlays can either enhance learning by revealing the expert’s covert cognitive processes or, for perceptually simple tasks, overload the learner with redundant information. Interestingly, one study of medical image diagnosis found that experienced experts benefited from gaze modeling even more than novices did, improving diagnostic performance, scanning efficiency, and their ability to adapt skills to unfamiliar visualizations. This suggests that eye movement modeling examples can promote adaptive expertise, helping even seasoned professionals confront the evolving technologies that constantly reshape their fields.

The authors are candid about the limits of their evidence. Only eight studies met the strict inclusion criteria, and sample sizes were small and methodologically heterogeneous, so the performance advantages of gaze training should be interpreted with caution and cannot yet be generalized. Eye trackers measure only foveal vision, missing the covert shifts of attention that let people process information in peripheral and parafoveal regions, and the cost of research-grade systems, ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of euros, remains a barrier to widespread adoption. The exclusive reliance on Scopus may also have omitted relevant studies indexed elsewhere. Still, the review’s core conclusion stands: experts are more focused, organized, and deliberate in their visual behavior than novices, gaze-trained individuals show measurable performance advantages in the tasks examined, and rendering the invisible perceptual strategies of expertise visible may be one of the most promising frontiers in professional training, with implications for medicine, aviation, industry, sport, and education alike.

Subject of Research: A systematic review of skills-transfer and gaze strategies studied through eye-tracking across professional domains

Article Title: Skills-Transfer and Gaze Strategies Studied by Eye-Tracking: A Systematic Review

Article References: Lupia, E., Bortolotti, A., & Palumbo, R. (2026). Skills-Transfer and Gaze Strategies Studied by Eye-Tracking: A Systematic Review. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00535-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00535-6

Keywords: eye-tracking, expertise, skill transfer, gaze training, quiet eye, eye movement modeling examples, visual attention, surgical training, human performance, systematic review, cognitive science, training methods