Visual attention of professional and interprofessional medical teams

Overview

This research strand sits at the intersection of medical education, social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. At its core, we ask: how do members of medical teams coordinate their visual attention during joint tasks, and what does this reveal about how expertise, and role shape shared situational awareness? We aim to deepen our understanding of how different professionals perceive and respond to the same clinical environment, and what this means for patient safety and team performance.

key publications: [Bellstedt et al., 2026]

Multiparty eye-tracking methodology to measure visual coordination in teams

We apply mobile eye-tracking technology to record the gaze of multiple team members during ecological valid scenarios. We extend to multimodal learner analytics by incorporating heart-rate sensors, and mobile EEG.

This data serves three research objectives:

1. Quantify visual attention across professional roles
How do team members from different professions distribute their attention across the learning environment? Are there systematic differences in what doctors, nurses, and other professionals attend to, and do these differences reflect distinct professional scripts?

2. Characterize gaze coordination in teams
To what extent do team members attend to the same information at the same time? How does shared visual attention relate to successful communication, task performance, and clinical outcomes?

3. Compare attention patterns across team configurations and task conditions
How do different team compositions or clinical scenarios produce different patterns of visual coordination? What conditions foster or hinder the alignment of attention across professional boundaries?

Educational impact

The findings from this research strand may inform how professional and interprofessional training is designed and how teams are prepared for high-stakes medical environments. By rendering visible the otherwise hidden dynamics of gaze coordination in teams, multiparty eye-tracking offers a new lens on what makes collaboration effective. Ultimately, the goal is to translate these insights into practical guidance for team training and debriefings.