THE MUSICIANS' GLANCE: A PILOT STUDY COMPARING EYE MOVEMENT PARAMETERS IN MUSICIANS AND NON-MUSICIANS Reinhard Kopiez Hanover University of Music and Drama, Germany Niels Galley University of Cologne, Germany ABSTRACT The study aims to test whether the eye movements (saccades) of professional musicians differ from a corresponding non- musician control group. It is assumed that the early commencement of instrumental practice, which is characterized by demanding "visual input" for the perceptual system (such as the reading of musical notation), can modify the way visual information is processed in professional adult musicians. It can be assumed that the movement parameters of the oculomotoric system reveal a kind of "fingerprint" of a person's way of processing information. However, up until now, no data has been available that could illuminate special features of eye movements in musicians compared to non-musicians. An electrooculogram (EOG) was used to obtain eye movement data (horizontal movements only) from 8 professional musicians (pianists) while performing an oculomotoric tracking task on a screen (hereafter called the "jumping point"). The jumping point's velocity increased over 90 seconds from 0.2 to 1.5 Hz, following a rectangular waveform of movement. An extensive sample of psychology students (n = 254) served as the control group. The data revealed clear differences in eye movement parameters between musicians and non-musicians: The 'musicians' glance' of our sample was characterized by a considerably reduced frequency of omissions, shorter reaction time in reactive saccades, a higher proportion of anticipatory saccades, higher saccade velocity and shorter anticipatory latencies. Our carefully selected group of musicians seem to be characterized by extremely efficient strategies for the processing of visual information in an oculomotoric task. All findings indicate a strong tendency for optimized task adaptation in professional musicians for a task which is different from the domain of music. Results are discussed within the framework of general mental ability for the efficient optimization of task adaptation. 1. INTRODUCTION During the last two decades, research into rapid eye movement (or so-called saccades) has highlighted numerous parameters which are useful indicators of general mental processes (for an overview see Galley, 1989; 1993a). For example, in the field of general visual information processing, saccadic movements can be used as a possible indicator of mental illness (Galley, Widera-Bernsen & Ishak, 1983) as well as for the measurement of the speed of mental processing (Galley & Galley, 1999; Jensen, 1998; Neubauer, 1995; Vernon, 1983). In the area of music-related tasks, patterns of saccadic eye movement have proven to be of central importance for the reading of music and especially the sight-reading of music. Thus eye movement research in music reading has a long tradition. From the very first studies on the eye-hand span in typewriting (Butsch, 1932) to more specific studies in the last few decades, visual information processing in musicians has been widely investigated. Of particular interest here are the studies on the eye-hand span in music reading by Weaver (1943), Sloboda (1974), and Truitt (1997) or in the work on eye movement parameters in sight reading by Jacobsen (1942), Young (1971), Goolsby (1987), and Kinsler & Carpenter (1995) (for the general theory and mechanisms of eye movements see Hallett, 1986). Due to the specific demands in reading music it seems reasonable to assume that the early commencement of instrumental practice, which is characterized by demanding "visual input" for the perceptual system (such as the reading of notation), can modify the way visual information is processed in adult musicians. It is however, difficult to draw parallels as to the acquisition of reading skills: because of a widespread similar age for the commencement of reading for all children, there are no studies which tackle the question whether the early commencement of reading could influence oculomotoric behavior in adulthood. The only parallel which can surely be drawn is that reading and music reading can be classified as highly automated saccades in the sense of Findlay and Walker's (1999) model. Up until now, no data has been available that could compare features of eye movements in musicians to a non-musician control group under the condition of a non music-specific task. In summary, it can be assumed that the movement parameters of the oculomotoric system reveal a kind of 'fingerprint' of a person's way of processing visual information, and that musicians' 'fingerprint' will be different to that of non- musicians. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Sydney, 2002 C. Stevens, D. Burnham, G. McPherson, E. Schubert, J. Renwick (Eds.). Adelaide: Causal Productions. ISBN 1 876346 39 6 683