The association of eye movements and performance accuracy in a novel sight-reading task

Abstract

The present study investigated how eye movements were associated with performance accuracy during sight-reading. Participants performed a complex span task in which sequences of single quarter note symbols that either enabled chunking or did not enable chunking were presented for subsequent serial recall. In between the presentation of each note, participants sight-read a notated melody on an electric piano in the tempo of 70 bpm. All melodies were unique but contained four types of note pairs: eighth-eighth, eighth-quarter, quarter-eighth, quarter-quarter. Analyses revealed that reading with fewer fixations was associated with a more accurate note onset. Fewer fixations might be advantageous for sight-reading as fewer saccades have to be planned and less information has to be integrated. Moreover, the quarter-quarter note pair was read with a larger number of fixations and the eighth-quarter note pair was read with a longer gaze duration. This suggests that when rhythm is processed, additional beats might trigger re-fixations and unconventional rhythmical patterns might trigger longer gazes. Neither recall accuracy nor chunking processes were found to explain additional variance in the eye movement data.

A Hebbian Model to Account for Musical Expertise Differences in a Working Memory Task.

“…Eye tracking and Midi data were recorded during the musical performance. They were used to analyze the association of the number and duration of xation with the accuracy of performing the melodies [32]. These analyses, however, were unrelated to the present work and hence will not be reported in any further detail.…”

“…In addition, a melodic cell (i.e., a major triad or arbitrary trichord) was de ned as being recalled correctly if its three notes were recalled correctly. The Midi data of the musical performance was analyzed with the algorithm MidiAnalyze [32] to derive how accurately distractor melodies were performed.…”

Markers of musical expertise in a sight-reading task: An eye-tracking study.

“…Some studies compare experimental groups of expertise based on music conservatory level (Drai-Zerbib & Baccino, 2018; Drai-Zerbib et al, 2012) or years of musical practice (Huovinen et al, 2018; Penttinen et al, 2015). In other studies, experimental groups are formed by discriminating participants based on their task accuracy (Cara, 2018; Gilman & Underwood, 2003; Hadley et al, 2018; Lörch, 2021). To define their experimental groups, some authors distinguish, for example, between skilled and less skilled sight-readers based on the number of errors they make (Lim et al, 2019; Sloboda, 1974) or their chosen tempo (Truitt et al, 1997).…”