Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Pupillometry uses pupil diameter as a physiological measure of cognitive effort and load. In static tasks, pupillometry hasrevealed that cognitive effort varies with expertise, and, combined with gaze analysis, shows that experts can exert effort tofocus on non-salient visual input. Much real-life expertise is practiced in dynamic tasks, and expert effort in dynamic tasksremains unstudied. Using tetris as a dynamic task environment, we collected pupil and gameplay data from individuals ofvarying expertise levels. We then use collected data and examine cognitive workload differences across levels of expertise.Consistent with studies of image saliency and gaze, our results indicate that experts and novices engage differently withthe task and do not experience the same cognitive workload. Further inspection will likely reveal strategy-level sources ofthese differences.