Interprofessional teams see differently – a cross-over study using dual mobile eye-tracking
Published in Advances in Health Sciences Education, 2026
This study used dual mobile eye-tracking, with glasses worn simultaneously by both team members, to examine how medical and nursing students allocated their visual attention while working through clinical cases: alone with same-profession partners, and together in mixed teams. Monoprofessional teams showed clearly profession-specific gaze, with medical students dwelling on biomedical information and nursing students on nursing and psychosocial detail. In interprofessional teams, both types of information received attention, but not because the two professions converged. Each retained its own focus, so that the team s broader coverage emerged from complementarity rather than from a shared or averaged pattern.
The findings carry a direct implication for interprofessional education: the value of professional diversity may lie precisely in preserving distinct perceptual perspectives rather than standardizing them. These attentional templates form early and persist when professions work side by side. Training approaches that seek to homogenize how team members attend to a case therefore risk eroding the very complementarity that gives interprofessional teams their breadth — before that complementary value is fully understood.
Recommended citation: Bellstedt, M., Bostedt, D., Samoukina, A., Papan, C., Otto, N., Robitzsch, A., Friederichs, H., Schneider, B., & Darici, D. (2026). Interprofessional teams see differently: a cross-over study using dual mobile eye-tracking. Advances in Health Sciences Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-026-10568-2
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