Abstract

Eye-movement studies of manual production often average gaze across an entire trial, obscuring how visual information use changes once actions begin. We separated the pre-writing and writing phases in a fixed progressive Chinese calligraphy task. Thirty-seven postgraduate students completed two style-guided transfer (SGT) pages, a worked example, and two evolution-based mapping (EBM) pages; 34 contributed usable gaze data. On SGT pages, reference allocation fell from 0.626 before writing to 0.131 during writing, whereas the share of reference viewing directed to diagnostic tokens rose from 0.473 to 0.601. On EBM pages, allocation to the cue-plus-context display fell from 0.825 to 0.447 after pen onset but remained substantial; cue share and context coverage also declined. Participant-level process blocks did not improve quality models. In exploratory page-level EBM analyses, greater pre-writing context coverage was associated with higher product quality. These findings identify pen onset as a useful boundary for analyzing visual information use in constrained production: external sampling is greatest before writing, and task-specific re-access persists during execution. Because the task order was fixed, page-family differences cannot be separated from practice or scaffolding. Phase-specific area-of-interest measures can therefore add process information to product scores without treating gaze as a direct measure of cognition.

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