Joint visual attention in medical training

Overview

This research strand sits at the intersection of medical education, cognitive neuroscience, and perceptual psychology.

key publications: [Lorenz et al., 2024; Darici et al., 2025a; Darici et al., 2025b; Sieg et al., 2025]

Dual eye-tracking methodology to measure joint visual attention

We apply dual mobile eye-tracking technology to simultaneously record the gaze of both teacher and student during live medical training scenarios.

This dyad-level approach opens up new ways to study interaction patterns such as joint visual attention, joint mental effort, and leader-follower dynamics, which shed light on differential social roles and social scripts that structure medical training.

This data serves three research objectives:

1. Quantify joint visual attention during medical training
How much time do teacher-student pairs spend attending to the same visual information? Are there critical windows within a teaching session when joint attention is highest, and do these windows correspond to moments of instruction?

2. Characterize leader-follower-dynamics
Who initiates joint visual attention and does this change across the time of a single teaching session? How do leader-follower patterns differ between dyads where learning is successful versus those where it is not?

3. Compare instructional approaches
How do different teaching and learning strategies produce different patterns of joint visual attention?

Educational impact

The findings from this research strand may inform how medical teaching time is structured and how instructors are trained to engage learners. By making visible the otherwise invisible coordination of attention during teaching, dual eye-tracking offers a new window onto what makes instruction effective. Ultimately, the goal is to translate these insights into practical guidance for educators and into tools that support reflective teaching practice.