Patterns of gaze and attention can reveal how some people unconsciously figure out how to master a task, MIT researchers have shown.

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MIT researchers have demonstrated that tacit knowledge — the unconscious, hard-to-articulate expertise people develop through experience — can be detected and surfaced using eye-tracking cameras and EEG brain-wave monitoring. In a study published in the Journal of Neural Engineering, 30 volunteers classified images while their gaze and brain activity were recorded. Over time, participants unconsciously shifted attention to the most informative part of each image, improving accuracy, yet could not consciously describe this shift. When shown maps of their own gaze and attention patterns, volunteers further improved their classification performance. The researchers believe this approach could generalize to domains requiring keen observation, such as medical imaging diagnosis, skilled trades, and sports.

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