Layered Development of Visual Search Expertise in Architects

It is widely proposed that perceptual expertise is characterized by an increased reliance on peripheral visual information during search, as described by Holistic Visual Processing (HVP) theory. HVP predicts that experts make longer saccades to construct a holistic representation of the visual scene and facilitate target detection. Our previous work challenged this prediction by showing that expert architects made shorter, rather than longer, saccades during visual search. The present study investigated how this atypical search strategy develops by comparing expert architects, intermediate architects, and naïve observers performing the same visual search task. Intermediate architects exhibited shorter saccades than naïve observers, but not to the extent observed in experts, while demonstrating search efficiency intermediate to the two groups. Analyses of the temporal organization of search further revealed that intermediate architects had already adopted the overall structure of the expert search strategy despite not yet exhibiting expert-level reductions in saccadic amplitude. These findings suggest that perceptual expertise in architecture develops through a layered progression in which the organization of visual search precedes the full refinement of eye movement behavior. More broadly, these findings suggest that eye movement research should interpret gaze metrics such as saccadic amplitude within the context of domain-specific task demands and developmental stage, while considering the temporal organization of search as an additional window into the emergence of perceptual expertise.