Eye tracking

Exploring interaction modes for image retrieval

by Corey Engelman

Published in the ACM digital library, proceedings of the 2011 Novel Gaze Controlled Applications conference in Karlskrona, Sweden.

The number of digital images in use is growing at an increasing rate across a wide array of application domains. That... more The number of digital images in use is growing at an increasing rate across a wide array of application domains. That being said, there is an ever-growing need for innovative ways to help endusers gain access to these images quickly and effectively. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to manually annotate these images, for example with text labels, to generate useful metadata. One such method for helping users gain access to digital images is content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Practical use of CBIR systems has been limited by several "gaps", including the well-known semantic gap and usability gaps [1]. Innovative designs are needed to bring end users into the loop to bridge these gaps. Our human-centered approaches integrate human perception and multimodal interaction to facilitate more usable and effective image retrieval. Here we show that multi-touch interaction is more usable than gaze based interaction for explicit image region selection.

Early effects of word surprisal on pupil size during reading

by Stefan Frank

Frank, S.L. & Thompson, R.L. (2012). Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

This study investigated the relation between word surprisal and pupil dilation during reading. Participants' eye... more This study investigated the relation between word surprisal and pupil dilation during reading. Participants' eye movements and pupil size were recorded while they read single sentences. Surprisal values for each word in the sentence stimuli were estimated by both a recurrent neural network and a phrase-structure grammar. Higher surprisal corresponded to longer word-reading time, and this effect was stronger when surprisal values were estimated by the neural network. In addition, there was an early, positive effect of surprisal on pupil size, from about 250 ms before word fixation until 100 ms after fixation. This early effect, which was only significant for the network-based surprisal estimates, is suggestive of a preparation-based account of surprisal.

Gaze fixations predict brain activation during the voluntary regulation of picture-induced negative affect

by Tom Johnstone

Exploring workload and attention measurements with uLog mouse data

by annemiek van Drunen

Eye Movement Sequences during Simple versus Complex Information Processing of Scenes in Autism Spectrum Disorder

by Sheena Au-Yeung

Authors: Sheena K. Au-Yeung, Valerie Benson, Monica Castelhano, and Keith Rayner

Published in "Autism Research and Treatment", 2011

doi:10.1155/2011/657383

Minshew and Goldstein (1998) postulated that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a disorder of complex information... more Minshew and Goldstein (1998) postulated that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a disorder of complex information processing. The current study was designed to investigate this hypothesis. Participants with and without ASD completed two scene perception tasks: a simple “spot the difference” task, where they had to say which one of a pair of pictures had a detail missing, and a complex “which one's weird” task, where they had to decide which one of a pair of pictures looks “weird”. Participants with ASD did not differ from TD participants in their ability to accurately identify the target picture in both tasks. However, analysis of the eye movement sequences showed that participants with ASD viewed scenes differently from normal controls exclusively for the complex task. This difference in eye movement patterns, and the method used to examine different patterns, adds to the knowledge base regarding eye movements and ASD. Our results are in accordance with Minshew and Goldstein's theory that complex, but not simple, information processing is impaired in ASD.

Bergelson and Swingley (2012)

by Linda Lo Curto

Interesting eye-tracking experiment which shows infants looking at objects that mother pronounces.

Permutation Test for Groups of Scanpaths Using Normalized Levenshtein Distances and Application in NMR Questions

by Hui Tang

Hui Tang, Joseph J. Topczewski, Anna M. Topczewski, Norbert J. Pienta

Short paper - In proceedings of the 2012 Symposium on Eye-tracking Research & Applications (ETRA), Santa Barbara, CA, March 27-30, 2012.
Talk and poster presented at the conference.

Software to compute Levenshtein distances and to do permutation tests are in C, R and Java.

Link of full paper: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2168584

Abstract
This paper presents a permutation test that statistically compares two groups of scanpaths. The test... more Abstract
This paper presents a permutation test that statistically compares two groups of scanpaths. The test uses normalized Levenshtein distances when the lengths of scanpaths are not the same. This method was applied in a recent eye-tracking experiment in which two groups of chemistry students viewed nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopic signals and chose the corresponding molecular structure from the candidates. A significant difference was detected between the two groups, which is consistent with the fact that students in the expert group showed more efficient scan patterns in the experiment than the novice group. Various numbers of permutations were tested and the results showed that p-values only varied in a small range with different permutation numbers and that the statistical significance was not affected.

Eye–tracking Study of Complexity in Gas Law Problems

by Hui Tang

Tang, H.; Pienta, N. (in press). Journal of Chemical Education.

This study, part of a series utilizing online tools to assess problem–solving, uses eye–tracking hardware and software... more This study, part of a series utilizing online tools to assess problem–solving, uses eye–tracking hardware and software to explore the effect of problem difficulty and cognitive processes when students solve gas law word problems. Eye movements are indices of cognition; eye–tracking data typically include the location, duration, and sequence of subjects’ fixations on the visual representations. Such information is not usually discovered using traditional assessment methods (e.g., written examinations and scores) when measurements of cognitive performance and/or task difficulty are needed. The results of this study reveal that when compared to successful ones, unsuccessful students spend more time considering their solutions and fixating more on the questions as they attempt to solve the problem. These results demonstrate that eye–tracking is a useful new approach for exploring problem difficulty and student cognitive activities in chemical education research.

A non-verbal Turing Test: Differentiating mind from machine in gaze-based social interaction

by Bert Timmermans

Pfeiffer UJ, Timmermans B, Bente G, Vogeley K, & Schilbach L (2011). A non-verbal Turing Test: Differentiating mind from machine in gaze-based social interaction. PLoS ONE 6(11): e27591.

In social interaction, gaze behavior provides important signals that have a significant impact on our perception of... more In social interaction, gaze behavior provides important signals that have a significant impact on our perception of others. Previous investigations, however, have relied on paradigms in which participants are passive observers of other persons’ gazes and do not adjust their gaze behavior as is the case in real-life social encounters. We used an interactive eye-tracking paradigm that allows participants to interact with an anthropomorphic virtual character whose gaze behavior is responsive to where the participant looks on the stimulus screen in real time. The character’s gaze reactions were systematically varied along a continuum from a maximal probability of gaze aversion to a maximal probability of gaze-following during brief interactions, thereby varying contingency and congruency of the reactions. We investigated how these variations influenced whether participants believed that the character was controlled by another person (i.e., a confederate) or a computer program. In a series of experiments, the human confederate was either introduced as naïve to the task, cooperative, or competitive. Results demonstrate that the ascription of humanness increases with higher congruency of gaze reactions when participants are interacting with a naïve partner. In contrast, humanness ascription is driven by the degree of contingency irrespective of congruency when the confederate was introduced as cooperative. Conversely, during interaction with a competitive confederate, judgments were neither based on congruency nor on contingency. These results offer important insights into what renders the experience of an interaction truly social: Humans appear to have a default expectation of reciprocation that can be influenced drastically by the presumed disposition of the interactor to either cooperate or compete.

An Eye-tracking Study of Feature-based Choice in One-shot Games

by Sibilla Di Guida

Co-authored with Giovanna Devetag and Luca Polonio

We assume that subjects in one-shot games apply boundedly rational decision heuristics which do not involve best... more We assume that subjects in one-shot games apply boundedly rational decision heuristics which do not involve best responding to beliefs about one’s opponents: rather, they involve best responding to a simplification of the original decision problem, obtained either by ignoring the other players motivations or by taking them into consideration only for a subset of all possible game outcomes. In Di Guida and Devetag (2011) we show that by manipulating a game set of descriptive features (i.e., features that can be changed without altering a game equilibrium properties) we can induce systematic changes in players behavior. We explain our findings by suggesting that the descriptive features we introduce provide optimal solutions to subjects using boundedly rational heuristics. In this study we replicate the experiment in Di Guida and Devetag (2011) and analyze subjects eye movements to test whether observed choices are compatible with boundedly rational heuristics or with best responding to beliefs. We manipulate the variance of the strategy yielding the highest payoff sum to the row player, and the presence of a non-equilibrium attractor (i.e., a salient outcome with high and symmetric payoffs placed in a focal position in the matrix). Our choice data by and large confirm our previous results, namely: when the variance of the strategy with the highest payoff sum is low and/or when the attractor is present, the two corresponding strategies capture the vast majority of players choices. Our analysis of eye movements show that subjects on average perform a very partial and selective analysis of the game matrix, often ignoring the payoffs of the opponent and/or paying attention only to specific cells of the matrix. We find that the two most frequent eye-movements are those connecting one’s own payoffs associated with a single strategy, and those connecting the two players payoffs within the same cell. We also find correlations between choices and eye movements.

van Stockum, S., MacAskill, M. R., & Anderson, T. J. (2011). Bottom-up effects modulate saccadic latencies in well-known eye movement paradigm. Psychological Research, 75, 272-278. doi:10.1007/s00426-010-0305-

by Michael MacAskill

A well-known eye movement paradigm com-bines saccades (fast eye movements) with a perceptual dis-crimination task. At... more A well-known eye movement paradigm com-bines saccades (fast eye movements) with a perceptual dis-crimination task. At a variable time after the onset of a central arrow cue indicating the target direction [the stimu-lus onset asynchrony (SOA)], discrimination symbols appear brieXy at saccade target and non-target locations. A previous study revealed an unexpected eVect of SOA on saccadic latencies: latencies were longer in trials with longer SOAs. It was suggested that this eVect reXects a top-down process as observers may wait for the discrimination symbol to appear before executing saccades. However, symbol onsets may also modulate saccade latencies from the bottom-up. To clarify the origin of the SOA eVect on latencies in this paradigm, we used a simpliWed version of the original task plus two new symbol onset conditions for comparison. The results indicate that the modulation of saccadic latencies was not due to a top-down strategy, but to a combination of two opposing bottom-up eVects: the symbol onsets at the target location shortened saccade latencies, while symbol onsets at non-target locations lengthened saccade latencies.

Interactions between eye movement systems in cats and humans

by Gudrun Moeller

Saccade-related activity in areas 18 and 21a of cats freely viewing complex scenes

by Gudrun Moeller

Gaze behaviour during interception in children with Spastic Unilateral Cerebral Palsy.

by john van der kamp

van Kampen, P.M., Ledebt, A., Smorenburg, A.R.P., Vermeulen, R.J., Kelder, M.E., van der Kamp, J., & Savelsbergh, G.J.P. (2012). In: Research in Developmental Disabilities, 33, 45-53.

Eyes as windows to the soul: Gazing behavior is related to personality

by John Rauthmann

Exploring the merits of perceptual anticipation in the soccer penalty kick

by john van der kamp

van der Kamp, J. (2011).  In: Motor Control, 15, 342-358.

Gaze in golf putting: Effects of slope

by john van der kamp

van Lier, W., van der Kamp, J. & Savelsbergh, G.J.P. (2010). In: International Journal of Sport Psychology, 41,160-176.

Visual search behaviour in skilled field-hockey goalkeepers

by john van der kamp

Cañal-Bruland, R., & van der Kamp, J. Arkestijn, M., Jansen, R.G., & van Kesteren, J., & Savelsbergh, G.J.P. (2010). In: International Journal of Sport Psychology, 41, 327-339.

Another look at the Müller-Lyer illusion: Different gaze patterns in vision for action and perception

by john van der kamp

van Doorn, H., van der Kamp, J., de Wit, M., & Savelsbergh, G.J.P. (2009). In: Neuropsychologia, 47, 804-812.

Anticipation and visual search behaviour in expert soccer goalkeepers

by john van der kamp

Savelsbergh, G.J.P., van der Kamp, J., Williams, A.M., & Ward, P. (2005). In: Ergonomics, 48, 1686-1697.