About our group
Medical expertise is, to a remarkable degree, a visual skill. Whether recognizing a suspicious pattern in a histology slide, or reading the subtle cues of a patient in distress, expert clinicians see differently from novices. They know where to look, and how to extract meaning from visual complexity that can overwhelm the untrained eye. Yet despite how central vision is to clinical practice, we still understand surprisingly little about how this visual expertise develops, and why so many learners struggle to acquire it under conventional instruction.
This is the question that drives our work.
Contacts
d.darici<at>mul-ct.de
Our Approach
We are a research group that use eye-tracking to measure visual expertise in laboratory and authentic educational settings. This allows us to capture where students and clinicians look during learning, and how gaze patterns change with growing expertise. In addition, we record dyads and groups in natural interactions to study the educational impact of joint visual attention and other related constructs.
Building on this, we develop and test instructional interventions such as eye movement modelling examples, and AI-assisted tools that make expert attention explicit and learnable. We evaluate these approaches in cross-sectional and randomised controlled studies across a range of medical domains, including histology, sonography, radiology, and robotic surgery.
Why It Matters
As medical training faces growing pressure characterized by more students, shorter contact time, increasing complexity, and AI-assisted working environments, scalable and evidence-based approaches to teaching visual expertise become ever more important.
Our work also speaks to broader questions in cognitive science and educational psychology: how perceptual learning works, how expertise is transferred between individuals, how learners interact with each other, and how technology can be designed to support rather than bypass the development of genuine competence.
Our Community
We are part of the medical education research community and maintain active connections with anatomy educators, medical educators, cognitive scientists, clinicians, and educational technologists. Our work appears in top-tier journals including Medical Education, Medical Teacher, and Anatomical Sciences Education, and is presented at international conferences such as AMEE. We collaborate with clinical training programmes across Germany and internationally, such as Harvard Graduate School of Education.
If you are interested in our work or in joining the lab, please visit the Join Us page.