Saccade Direction Information Channel

Abstract

Eye tracking has become an increasingly important technology in many fields of research, such as marketing, human computer interaction, psychology, and also in human cognition. Understanding the human eye movements, while viewing specific scenarios, can be of great support for improving visual stimuli. However, the challenging problem with this kind of spatio-temporal data is to find quantitative links between eye movements and human cognition. This paper introduces the information channel based on saccade direction. The gaze transition between different saccade directions is modeled as a discrete information channel, which we call saccade direction information channel. The channel is applied to an eye-tracking dataset on Van Gogh’s paintings observation. In our results, horizontal saccades are more frequent than vertical saccades, and the information conveyed in horizontal/vertical displacements, measured as the mutual information of the channel, is higher than in diagonal displacements. By comparing the results to our previous spatial gaze channel between Areas of Interest (AOIs) we constate that the spatial channel discriminates better between the observed images, while the direction channel discriminates better between observers.