Expert musicians’ visual behaviour during change blindness

This event is part of a series of Psychology seminars that regularly occurs during the Autumn and Spring terms.

Musicians working in the field of contemporary classical music are often confronted with the task of learning highly complex material in a very short time. More often than not, the complexity is such that the notes cannot be sight-read directly off the score, meaning that the material must be rehearsed intensely for it to be stored in Long Term Memory before performance. During performance, the printed notes then act as retrieval cues.

While a considerable amount of research into the classical repertoire (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, etc.) has been performed, little is yet known about the processes taking place when dealing with the memorisation of contemporary classical works. In the present study, the focus was on visual attention and visual Working Memory, crucial factors for expert musicians facing visually presented complex musical notation.

To this end, a change blindness test was performed on 60 participants (experts n=30; novices n=30) using three types of custom- made musical examples of diverse nature, style, and complexity as stimuli (tonal, simple; atonal,complex; random, or nonsense).

In addition to gathering data on detection time and accuracy, the participants’ visual behaviour was documented (fixations, saccades, pupillometry) while they performed the change detection task so as to gain insight into how they went about spotting the differences. The findings are discussed in light of the existing literature on visual cognition and expert memory.