Saccadic and visuo-motor flexibility towards local parafoveal complexity as a hallmark of expert knowledge-driven processing during sight-reading of music

International audience ; Expert memory theories postulate that with the acquisition of expertise, informational units are no longer encoded and retrieved in an individual way but rather in a meaningful and structured way (Chase & Simon, 1973a, 1973b; Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995; Gobet & Simon, 1996). Experts perceive information in the form of microstructures of semantically linked elements, called chunks, facilitating information processing (Gobet et al., 2001). They also benefit from macrostructural high-level knowledge integrated in long-term memory (LTM) in the form of networks called retrieval structures (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995, 2000) or templates (Gobet & Simon, 1996, 2000), which can be activated during information processing. In concrete terms, thanks to microstructural association mechanisms and the activation of macrostructural LTM knowledge, information is processed in a rapid (principle