PhD candidate, School of Health Professions Education (SHE), department of Educational Development...

Due to technological advances, modern society is dominated by increasingly complex images. For instance, radiologists diagnose medical conditions from complex visualizations such as radiographs and computer tomography (CT) scans, and social scientists make use of graphs and animations depicting socio-demographic trends. These tasks require visual problem-solving skills, which refer to the detection and interpretation of relevant information from a complex visualization to come to a conclusion, decision or diagnosis. In modern society, this is an important but underestimated 21st-century skill.

The aim of this PhD trajectory is to answer the following research questions:

1.    What verbal and non-verbal actions do ‘masters’ in visual problem-solving take to help apprentices attend to relevant information and form a high-quality mental representation?

2.    What are the effects of the masters’ actions on apprentices’ attention allocation, understanding, and performance in a visual problem-solving task?

3.    What effect does additional instructional support in the form of verbal and non-verbal ‘cueing’ and ‘chunking’ have on the interaction between master and apprentice as well as on the apprentices’ attention allocation, understanding and performance when engaging in a visual problem-solving task?