Niels Galley

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