Utilizing Gaze Training to Enhance Laparoscopic Skills Training

Developing expert performance requires assessment of the thought processes underlying performance and continued refinement of skills in order to obtain automaticity and intuition. Therefore, developing expert surgical skill is a process likely to take longer than the length of residency, thereby diminishing the quality of care delivered to patients.

The proposed study will implement novel neuroscience technique of gaze training to determine if it has the capacity to accelerate technical surgical skill learning in order to achieve competency and expertise in an earlier timeframe. Studies of skill performance have demonstrated that eye movement patterns can be optimized to improve subsequent motor movements. Therefore, gaze training encourages novices to adopt the more efficient gaze patterns of experts while performing a specific task such as laparoscopic surgery. This technique has been applied in the training of surgical residents in a limited capacity making this project an innovative approach to enhance skill development.

Experiment 2: Determine if gaze training can accelerate the learning of laparoscopic skills.

In this experiment the investigators will first establish expert gaze patterns in the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery modules 1 and 5 by testing a total of 9 participants, including attending surgeons, senior residents, and novices trained to proficiency. The investigators will then compare behavioral learning curves from non-expert participants without gaze training against those trained using both explicit (by reviewing the expert gaze pattern) and implicit gaze (by using a visual mask during the training, leading the participant to follow the expert gaze) derived from the expert gaze patterns. This will be tested in 3 groups of 20 participants, who train for 40-minutes in each of 6 sessions that occur within 3 weeks.

The investigators hypothesize that both explicit and implicit gaze training will lead to faster skill acquisition, with implicit greater than explicit and measured by trials required to gain proficient module completion scores, relative to the group of participants who practice without any gaze training.