As you might have heard, ETRA2020 will not take place this year due to COVID-19. We had the option to organize the workshop in 2021 co-located with ETRA2021. However, this may be too late for some of our authors to get meaningful and timely feedback. Thus, we decided to do a virtual event for EMIP 2020.

Our authors and interested participants are spread throughout the world on different time zones, so conducting a live virtual event would be too challenging. We plan to organize EMIP2020 in a asynchronous manner spanning over a full week. We will use the ETRA week (June 1st to 5th, 2020).

The idea is to provide a discord server, where the keynote and each paper can be discussed separately. The keynote and authors can record and share a presentation from their home office as a video. Everyone can then give feedback and discuss the work on their own time. In addition, we can have general discussion or a panel channels.

Keynote

Raymond Bertram, Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology, University of Turku, Finland How expertise changes perceptual processes – evidence from Eye Movement studies in reading Building up visual expertise goes hand in hand with changes in perceptual processes. In this presentation I draw parallels between visual expertise in reading development and medical imaging perception as studied by eye movements (EM). Reading is a domain of visual expertise that is easy to relate to, as it is a skill that is mastered by many people. Yet the perceptual processes involved in reading are far from simple and it requires a lot of practice before one becomes a fluent reader. The transition from beginning to skilled reading goes hand in hand with transitions in the size of the perceptual span and the extent and nature of parafoveal processing (Rayner, 1998, Häikiö et. al, 2009). Moreover, whereas beginning reading is to a large extent serial and bottom-up, skilled reading includes to a much greater extent parallel and top-down processes (Häikiö et. al., 2015). This entails that beginning reading involves to a much larger extent small units such as letters, syllables and morphemes, whereas skilled reading involves larger units such as words and word clusters. More delicate adaptations in EM patterns in response to linguistic demanding stimuli can also be observed (Salmela et al., in submission).

Developing visual pattern recognition skills in radiology is a domain of visual expertise that is mastered by a few people only and requires years of training. Yet the transition from beginner to expert in for instance CT scan reading bears resemblance to the transition in reading development. Also here the transition goes hand in hand with an increase in the perceptual span and the involvement of more top-down processes (Bertram et al., 2013). More delicate adaptations in EM patterns in response to the demands of the task and environment can also be observed (Bertram et al., 2016).

In sum, the overarching aim in the current presentation is to compare how visual expertise develops across two different domains and how this is reflected in eye movement behavior. To what extent these observations would extend to other domains like Eye Movements in Programming is open to debate.

You can find the slides here (PDF).