Learning to see like an expert: On the practices of professional vision and visual expertise

•This qualitative, observational video study analyzed professional vision.•A radiology expert modeled and explained visual practices to four laypeople.•The visual practices the expert used were highlighting, rotating, and zooming.•Analyses were founded on conversation analysis and ethnomethodology.•The findings contribute to practice-based theorizing on visual expertise. Goodwin’s notion of professional vision suggests that learning to see in professionally relevant ways includes appropriating the visual practices within a domain. This observational study aimed to analyze how experts communicate these visual practices to novices to help them make meaning of domain-specific representations. Informed by a sociocultural perspective and founded on conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, video-recorded discourse and interaction between one expert in radiology and four laypeople were analyzed. The findings indicate three visual practices the medical expert uses to teach the novices how to see: highlighting, rotating, and zooming. The qualitative analyses suggest that learning to see professionally can be described as the mastering of expert practices in a focal domain. Implications for visual expertise research are discussed.