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. 2022 Jul 28;15(4):10.16910/jemr.15.4.1.
doi: 10.16910/jemr.15.4.1. eCollection 2022.

A Meta-analysis on the Effect of Expertise on Eye Movements during Music Reading

Joris Perra  1   2 , Alice Latimier  1   2 , Bénédicte Poulin-Charronnat  1 , Thierry Baccino  3 , Véronique Drai-Zerbib  1
Affiliations

A Meta-analysis on the Effect of Expertise on Eye Movements during Music Reading

Joris Perra et al. J Eye Mov Res. .

Abstract

The current meta-analysis was conducted on 12 studies comparing the eye movements of expert versus non-expert musicians and attempted to determine which eye movement measures are expertise dependent during music reading. The total dataset of 61 comparisons was divided into four subsets, each concerning one eye-movement variable (i.e., fixation duration, number of fixations, saccade amplitude, and gaze duration). We used a variance estimation method to aggregate the effect sizes. The results support the robust finding of reduced fixation duration in expert musicians (Subset 1, g = -0.72). Due to low statistical power because of limited effect sizes, the results on the number of fixations, saccade amplitude, and gaze duration were not reliable. We conducted meta-regression analyses to determine potential moderators of the effect of expertise on eye movements (i.e., definition of experimental groups, type of musical task performed, type of musical material used or tempo control). Moderator analyses did not yield any reliable results. The need for consistency in the experimental methodology is discussed.

Keywords: Expertise; eye tracking; fixation duration; gaze duration; meta-analysis; music reading; number of fixations; saccade amplitude.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the consents of the article are in agreement with the ethics described in https://biblio.unibe.ch/portal/elibrary/BOP/jemr/ethics.html and that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this paper.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
PRISMA group flow diagram depicting study inclusion criteria. For each stage, we provide the number of included and excluded references, and the number of comparisons generated by the references.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Funnel plot for Subset 1. Each point represents the effect size of one included comparison. The X axis represents Hedges’ g for each comparison, and the Y axis is the corresponding standard error. Red solid line: mean effect size; black solid lines: CI for mean effect size; dashed lines: lower and upper limit values for the 95% CI and 99% CI regions.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Funnel plot for Subset 2.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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