Effects of Experts’ Annotations on Fashion Designers Apprentices’ Gaze Patterns and Verbalisations

Abstract

Visual expertise is a fundamental proficiency in many vocations and many questions have risen on the topic, with studies looking at experts and novices differences’ in observation (e.g., radiologists) or at ways to help novices achieve visual expertise (e.g., through annotations). However, most of these studies focus on white-collar professions and overlook vocational ones. For example, observing is uttermost important for fashion designers who spend most of their professional time on visual tasks related to creating patterns and garments or performing alterations. Therefore, this study focuses on trying to convey a professional way to look at images by exposing apprentices to images annotated (e.g., circles) by experts and identifying if their gaze (e.g., fixation durations and gaze coverage) and verbalisations (i.e., images descriptions) are affected. The study was conducted with 38 apprentices that were exposed to sequential sets of images depicting shirts, first non-annotated (pre-test), then annotated for the experimental group and non-annotated for the control group (training 1 and training 2), and finally non-annotated (post-test). Also, in the pre and post-test and in training 2 apprentices had to verbally describe each image. Gaze was recorded with the Tobii X2–60 tracker. Results for fixation durations showed that the experimental group looked longer in the annotated part of the shirt in training 1 and in the shirt’s central part at post-test. However, the experimental group did not cover a significantly larger area of the shirt compared to control and verbalisations show no difference between the groups at post-test.