Differences in Attention Allocation in Relation to Music Teacher Experience and Expertise

To assess allocation of attention by music teachers with different levels of experience and expertise, we recruited five participant flautists: an artist teacher, two graduate students, and two undergraduates, all of whom observed nine brief video recordings of flute, clarinet, and saxophone players; a juggler; a baseball batter; and a ballerina. We tracked participants’ gaze using wearable eye-tracking hardware and software, and we analyzed the targets and durations of over 1,300 visual fixations and the paths of participants’ eye movements while observing the videos. The gaze behavior of the artist teacher and one of the graduate students, when they observed flute playing, was much like that of the experts in other domains of human experience. These two participants’ fixations were longer than those of the other three participants, and the sequence of fixation targets reflected a hierarchical prioritization of the fundamentals of flute playing. These same features were not apparent when these same two participants observed the other videos, and they were not observed in the gaze behavior of the other three participants in any of the videos observed. The results of this study demonstrate that allocation of attention, as indicated by gaze behavior, is reflective of expertise in music teaching as it is in other domains.