Visual Expertise in History: Historians’ and Novices’ Visual Processing and Interpretation of Historical Images

Drawing on expertise research and scene perception studies, this study investigates the characteristics of
visual expertise in the domain of history by examining historians’ and novices’ visual processing and task
performance in an image integration task. Task complexity was manipulated by altering the ease of
identifying the topic depicted in a series of historical images. Historians (n = 40) and novices (n = 40) were
shown a series of black-and-white images. Their eye movements were recorded, and each participant
identified a topic for each series. Their written responses were coded for appropriateness and whether they
described the topic as part of a historical process. The results showed that compared to novices, historians
exhibited more consistent gaze behavior for each series of images, indicating a systematic approach to
interpreting them. Furthermore, novices’ fixation durations increased, and the number of fixations tended to
decrease from the first to the final image, suggesting that their gaze became more focused only for the later
images. Expertise also affected task performance: In the case of a more challenging set of images, historians
provided more appropriate topic answers and interpreted the topics as part of a historical process, indicating
that they were able to situate even the more complex series within a meaningful bigger picture. Thus, even in
the ill-structured domain of history, domain expertise induces differences in the visual processing and
interpretation of domain-related images compared to lack of such expertise.