Gaze behavior, attention allocation, and automaticity in expert chamber music coaches

Two artist-level chamber music coaches wore eye-tracking glasses while teaching a chamber rehearsal, then participated in two interviews to discuss their teaching – first, immediately after the rehearsal, then approximately 2 weeks later, while watching their lesson videos and eye-tracking recordings. Teachers’ eye movements revealed rich networks of rapid information tracking and goal-directed attention, but both teachers struggled to articulate details of their thinking or their attention allocation, suggesting that they conceive of their teaching behaviors in a broad construal, and the complex attentional behaviors detected in their gaze behavior occurred unconsciously. This is among the first studies to explore attentional mechanisms that underlie expert music teaching in context, specifically analyzing teachers’ momentary attention allocation among several students in relation to specific proximal performance goals. Results illustrate how teachers solved intricate problems, decided what to pursue, and kept track of multiple students in ways that are inaccessible via overt behavior observation. Comparing gaze behavior to interview data suggests that these teachers’ descriptions of their thinking may be incomplete representations of their pedagogical expertise.