There seems to be a stable and widelyheld belief among medical practitioners that good diagnosticians have a good eye that is innate, rather than trained. However, there is no evidence for any identifiable perceptual trait. Nonetheless, the process of developing a good eye in medicine is proposed, indicated, and elaborated by various measures contingent on diverse methodological arenas all of which attempt to advance our understanding of what constitutes visual cognition in diagnosing medical images. The purpose of this paper is to provide a reflection on this methodological pluralism. We first identify four metaphors used in the analysis of visual cognition: activation, detection, inference, and practice. These metaphors are described with an empirical example and discussed to elicit (partly tacit) assumptions associated with prototypical method decisions We then link the proposed metaphorical mapping to what it implies for current epistemological, methodological, and curricular discussions in medical education.
['Andreas Gegenfurtner', 'Anna Siewiorek']
The many dimensions of having a good eye: a methodological reflection of metaphors in visual cognition analysis