How Effective is Reflective Search? A Time Slice Analysis of Dentistry Students’ Visual Search Strategies and Pupil Dilation during the Diagnosis of Radiographs

This study intends to analyze already collected data of dentistry students of varying semesters diagnosing Orthopantomograms (OPTs) that feature dental anomalies. We plan on sampling all data that included 10 trials of 90 s of students searching for anomalies in such OPTs. We seek to investigate fixation gaze measures across time slices, specifically in earlier and later stages of trials. Through this, we intent to compare models from related disciplines in medical diagnosis, namely the Nodine & Kundel Model (1987), with our data. We also plan on investigating the utility of pupil dilation across time slices in predicting anomaly detection, expanding on previous finding linking pupil dilation to expertise in radiograph diagnosis (Castner et al., 2020). For our time slice analysis, we define earlier and later trial stages as the first and last 30 s of trials respectively. For a more fine-grained analysis, we plan on investigating slices of 9 x 10 s individually. Since the literature does not suggest specific time slice sizes to investigate, we expect these analyses to inform future research questions. Our hypotheses for the comparison of early and late trial stages are guided by previous research investigating visual search strategies of experts in medical diagnosis: First, we expect earlier stages of diagnosis to be characterized by more and shorter fixations than later stages (Hypothesis 1). Secondly, we conjecture that pupil dilation is especially predictive of diagnostic performance in later trials – indicating cognitive load during a reflective search strategy (Hypothesis 2). In short, this study has important implications for future medical eye-tracking research methodology, as we expect to find time slicing to be informative about student’s visual search strategies. This is a preregistration of the article: Borchers, C., Eder, T. F., Richter, J., Keutel, C., Huettig, F., & Scheiter, K. (2023). A time slice analysis of dentistry students’ visual search strategies and pupil dilation during diagnosing radiographs. Plos one, 18(6), e0283376. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283376 unknown other