Visual expertise development in anatomy education
We study how anatomy experts perceive visual information that novices overlook. Using eye-tracking, we record gaze behaviour of medical students examine histological sections, ultrasound scans, and anatomical structures to identify search patterns linked to accurate image interpretation and tracing how these develop across training. A translational question is how expert eye movements can serve as a teaching resource, and we investigate which instructional formats best support the transfer of visual expertise. 
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many medical schools were forced to transition mandatory curriculum courses to online teaching formats, yet little information existed about the feasibility and effectiveness of distance teaching in anatomy. In this paper we report on the rapid redesign and evaluation of a histology course, converting a traditional classroom-based format into a fully digital, synchronous online course. 
Becoming a physician is not only a matter of acquiring knowledge and technical skill, it also involves the gradual internalization of a professional identity. Hands-on clinical learning environments, where students handle instruments, interact with peers, and engage with real imaging data, are thought to accelerate this process by offering early, embodied glimpses into expert practice. 
Visual expertise in anatomy is not only a matter of perceptual training it is also shaped by the images students are trained on. The systematic over- or misrepresentation of certain bodies in learning materials may tacitly calibrate what medical students learn to recognize as “normal,” with downstream consequences for clinical perception and diagnostic reasoning. 
A central aspiration of anatomical education is that students not only retain course content but can apply their knowledge flexibly to novel problems, a capacity known as transfer of learning. In image-based disciplines like histology, transfer is inseparable from visual expertise: students must learn not just what to know, but where to look and what to attend to when confronting an unfamiliar slide. 
How students study is as consequential as what they study. Yet research on learning strategies in medical education has largely treated strategy use as a set of isolated variables rather than as coherent, individual patterns. This study took a person-centered approach to move beyond variable-centered analyses and instead identify the naturally occurring profiles of strategy use that medical students actually adopt. 
Interprofessional education aims to prepare future health professionals to collaborate effectively by learning with, from, and about each other. While its importance is widely recognized, when and where to introduce it in the curriculum remains debated. This study identified anatomy as a practical entry point, given that it is a foundational subject shared across health professions, and examined whether a single four-hour block course could meaningfully initiate interprofessional socialization. 
Expert visual perception is not simply a product of accumulated experience, it is characterized by highly efficient, task-directed gaze behavior that rapidly isolates diagnostically relevant features. For novice learners, these attentional strategies are invisible. Gaze cueing makes them explicit, overlaying recorded expert eye movements onto learning materials to give students direct access to where experts look and why. 
In robotic-assisted laparoscopic surgery, visual scene interpretation is one of the most demanding challenges trainees face. Effective surgical assistance depends on the ability to rapidly identify anatomical landmarks and follow the operative field — skills that are perceptual before they are procedural. Eye movement modeling examples (EMMEs) offer a principled approach to this challenge by making expert gaze behavior visible during training, guiding novice attention toward clinically critical areas. 
When introducing new clinical procedures, instructors often face a time allocation problem: how much of a session should be devoted to modelling demonstrating and explaining versus coaching scaffolding and supporting active student practice? The answer has direct consequences for how quickly students develop procedural visual expertise, yet empirical evidence has been largely absent. 
When a teacher and student share the same visual field, learning is shaped not only by what the teacher demonstrates but by how well the two align their attention in the moment. Attentional synchronisation (the degree to which teacher and learner look at the same thing at the same time) represents a measurable indicator of joint cognitive engagement, and its disruption may be one of the most consequential yet underexamined costs of distraction in clinical training environments. 
Learning strategies in anatomy encompass the diverse approaches students employ to master a challenging and highly visual subject. Yet research examining these strategies in isolation has remained inconclusive in part because students do not use strategies in isolation, but in characteristic combinations shaped by their motivation, goals, and prior experience. This study applied a person-centered approach to identify the naturally occurring learning profiles that anatomy students actually adopt, and to examine how these profiles relate to motivation and academic outcomes. 
Attention is the gateway to learning, and distraction is its most common adversary. While the detrimental effects of distraction on task performance are well documented, its specific interference with the cognitive architecture of medical learning has been less systematically examined. Cues such as gaze cueing techniques reduce extraneous cognitive load by directing learners’ attention to essential elements, freeing resources for deeper processing. Distractions, by contrast, impose additional extraneous load unrelated to the learning objective, leaving fewer cognitive resources available for processing the instructional content. 
Perception is the entry point to clinical reasoning, and professional training quietly shapes what each practitioner sees. It is widely assumed that interprofessional teams attend to a broader range of clinical information than monoprofessional teams — because each discipline is trained to prioritize different aspects of care — yet this assumption had rarely been tested at the level of attention itself.