In the present study, education majors minoring in music education (n = 24) and music performance majors (n =14) read and performed the original version and melodically altered versions of a simple melody in a given tempo. Eye movements during music reading and piano performances were recorded. Errorless trials were analyzed to explore the adjustments of visual processing in successful performances. The temporal length of the eye–hand span (time between gaze and the performed note) was typically around one second or less. A measure of gaze activity indicated that performers generally inspected two quarter-note areas between two metrical beat onsets. The performance majors operated with shorter fixation durations and applied larger eye–hand spans as well as greater gaze activity than education majors. The latter two measures were generally affected by unexpected melodic alterations and simple rhythmic patterns. The study manifests both the flexibility and limitations of the mechanisms of visual processing in temporally controlled music reading, addressing some of the everyday conceptions about sight-reading by means of systematic research.

A music reader has to “look ahead” from the notes currently being played—this has usually been called the Eye-Hand Span. Given the restrictions on processing time due to tempo and meter, the Early Attraction Hypothesis suggests that sight readers are likely to locally increase the span of looking ahead in the face of complex upcoming symbols (or symbol relationships). We argue that such stimulus-driven effects on looking ahead are best studied using a measure of Eye-Time Span (ETS) which redefines looking ahead as the metrical distance between the position of a fixation in the score and another position that corresponds to the point of metrical time at fixation onset. In two experiments of temporally controlled sight reading, musicians read simple stepwise melodies that were interspersed with larger intervallic skips, supposed to create points of higher melodic complexity (and visual salience) at the notes following the skips. The results support both Early Attraction (lengthening of looking ahead) and Distant Attraction (lengthening of incoming saccades) in the face of relative melodic complexity. Notably, such effects also occurred on the notes preceding the nominally complex ones. The results suggest that saccadic control in music reading depends on temporal restrictions as well as on local variations in stimulus complexity.

Eye movement data are outputs of an analyser tracking the gaze when a person is inspecting a scene. These kind of data are of increasing importance in scientific research as well as in applications, e.g. in marketing and man-machine interface planning. Thus the new areas of application call for advanced analysis tools. Our research objective is to suggest statistical modelling of eye movement sequences using sequential spatial point processes, which decomposes the variation in data into structural components having interpretation.We consider three elements of an eye movement sequence: heterogeneity of the target space, contextuality between subsequent movements, and time-dependent behaviour describing self-interaction. We propose two model constructions. One is based on the history-dependent rejection of transitions in a random walk and the other makes use of a history-adapted kernel function penalized by user-defined geometric model characteristics. Both models are inhomogeneous self-interacting random walks. Statistical inference based on the likelihood is suggested, some experiments are carried out, and the models are used for determining the uncertainty of important data summaries for eye movement data.

This article addresses the silent reading of music notation, combining eye-movement measures with a semantic analysis of readers' verbal descriptions of the notated music. A group of musical novices (n = 16) and two groups of musical amateurs (less experienced n = 11 and more experienced n = 10) participated in three separate measurement sessions during a nine-month-long university music course designed for future primary-school teachers. In each session they viewed a notated folk song for 30 s and then described what they had seen. Greater musical experience was found to be connected with shorter fixation durations, more linear scanning of the notated music, and more accurate and integrative verbal descriptions. Repeated measurements during the course were connected to more accurate and integrative descriptions as well as the use of longer saccades for all participants. A cluster analysis of the results revealed three separate silent-reading styles: elementary processors, lacking in both accuracy and integration in their verbal reports; accurate analyzers, producing accurate but non-integrative descriptions; and accurate integrators who, besides accurate and integrative descriptions, showed a tendency of using shorter fixation times than the two other groups. The results are discussed with a view to visual processes in other domains. In addition, a question is raised whether educational programs tend to unduly neglect considering music notation as a source of information beyond its role as a performance aid.

Central place foragers are animals that carry resources back to a particular location, the central place (Bell, 1990). Often, the motivation for central place foraging is to provide food for the offspring at the nest or den (Olsson & Bolin, 2014). Examples of such animals are bees carrying nectar to a hive (Higginson & Houston, 2015), birds bringing food to nestlings (Bell, 1990) and southern elephant seals making annual foraging migrations (Michelot et al., 2017). The basic model for a foraging trip consists of three phases: an outbound trip, a period of searching and a return trip (Bell, 1990). To understand the habitat requirements of central place foragers, it is important