Eye Movement Patterns Research Articles

Effect of Working Experience on Air Traffic Controller Eye Movement

Eye movement is an important indicator of information-seeking behavior and provides insight into cognitive strategies which are vital for decision-making. Various measures based on eye movements have been proposed to capture humans’ ability to process information in a complex environment. The effectiveness of these measures has not yet been fully explored in the field of air traffic management. This paper presents a comparative study on eye-movement measures in air traffic controllers with different levels of working experience. Two commonly investigated oculomotor behaviors, fixation and saccades, together with gaze entropy, are examined. By comparing the statistical properties of the relevant metrics, it is shown that working experience has a notable effect on eye-movement patterns. Both fixation and saccades differ between qualified and novice controllers, with the former type of controller employing more efficient searching strategies. These findings are useful in enhancing the quality of controller training and contributing to an understanding of the information-seeking mechanisms humans use when executing complex tasks

Perception of the Harvester Operator’s Working Environment in Windthrow Stands

The aim of the study was to determine the mental workload of a harvester operator when working in late thinning and in windthrown stands of the same type and age, using eye movement patterns as an indicator. Eyeball movement variability was analysed using the eye tracking method. The mean duration of eyesight fixations in windthrown stands was shorter than in the control undamaged stands by about 20% (444 ms and 534 ms, respectively). The mean time of eyesight movements (saccades) in the windthrown stands was shorter than in the control undamaged stands by approx. 15%. The largest differences between the duration of saccades in the windthrown and control stands were observed between the cutting of trees and cutting logs off their root plates: the saccades were longer by about 20% when working in the control stands (49 ms) as compared to the windthrown stands (43 ms). Large differences in the duration of saccades between the windthrown area (42 ms) and the control area (47 ms) were also found when travelling between successive operation sites. In both types of stands, the shortest saccades were observed during processing: 39 ms. Summary durations of saccades observed during the processing of successive trees occurred in sequences showing repeated periods of variable eyeball activity, where longer saccades were followed by shorter ones. Documented more variability of eyesight activities of the harvester operator performing the operations of processing and moving is new standard of eye balls activities for the more taxing work conditions presented by windthrown stands.

Complex nystagmus in traumatic benign paroxysmal positional vertigo: A case study on the critical value of knowing semicircular canal excitation and inhibition patterns

A 73-year-old female presented to the emergency department with chief complaint of dizziness after sustaining a fall one month prior to dizziness onset. Although careful examination of eye movement patterns during positional testing was attempted at varying stages of her inpatient admission, her complex nystagmus patterns as a result of traumatic benign paroxysmal vertigo were difficult to manage. In particular, the nystagmus pattern from this case suggests the BPPV was variable and affecting either 1) left posterior semicircular canal (pSCC) exclusively 2) left pSCC and right anterior semicircular canal, 3) left and right pSCC canal. This case illustrates the importance of two critical details; positional testing should include observing nystagmus with fixation removed and an experienced clinician should be involved as early as possible.

Identifying Expert and Novice Visual Scanpath Patterns and Their Relationship to Assessing Learning-Relevant Student Characteristics

The paper addresses cognitive processes during a teacher's professional task of assessing learning-relevant student characteristics. We explore how eye-movement patterns (scanpaths) differ across expert and novice teachers during an assessment situation. In an eye-tracking experiment, participants watched an authentic video of a classroom lesson and were subsequently asked to assess five different students. Instead of using typically reported averaged gaze data (e.g., number of fixations), we used gaze patterns as an indicator for visual behavior. We extracted scanpath patterns, compared them qualitatively (common sub-pattern) and quantitatively (scanpath entropy) between experts and novices, and related teachers' visual behavior to their assessment competence. Results show that teachers' scanpaths were idiosyncratic and more similar to teachers of the same expertise group. Moreover, experts monitored all target students more regularly and made recurring scans to re-adjust their assessment. Lastly, this behavior was quantified using Shannon's entropy score. Results indicate that experts' scanpaths were more complex, involved more frequent revisits of all students, and that experts transferred their attention between all students with equal probability. Experts' visual behavior was also statistically related to higher judgment accuracy.

Impact of the fMRI environment on eye-tracking measures in a linguistic prediction task

ABSTRACT The present study investigated the impact of the MRI environment on eye-movement measures in the visual-world paradigm. 24 neurotypical young adults performed a linguistic prediction task in a typical lab setting (Lab) and 22 did so during MRI scanning (Scanner). Data analyses focused on eye-tracking data quality and the time course and magnitude of prediction effects. Data quality was reduced in the Scanner as compared to the Lab, as indicated by a higher rate of track loss and saccades/fixations of atypical duration. Predictive eye movement patterns were generally similar in timing and magnitude between the Lab and Scanner, although there was modest evidence for increased prediction effects in the Scanner. In the Scanner environment only, predictive eye movements were linked to better task performance. Evidently, the MRI environment can enhance prediction effects and their relationship to task performance, possibly due to increased deployment of cognitive control mechanisms.

Applying the Hidden Markov Model to Analyze Urban Mobility Patterns: An Interdisciplinary Approach

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), there has been a proliferation of urban studies using big data. Yet, another type of urban research innovations that involve interdisciplinary thinking and methods remains underdeveloped. This paper represents an attempt to adopt a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) toolbox developed in Computer Science for the analysis of eye movement patterns in Psychology to answer urban mobility questions in Geography. The main idea is that both people’s eye movements and travel behavior follow the stop-travel-stop pattern, which can be summarized using HMM. Methodological challenges were addressed by adjusting the HMM to analyze territory-wide travel survey data in Hong Kong, China. By using the adjusted toolbox to identify the activity-travel patterns of working adults in Hong Kong, two distinctive groups of balanced (38.4%) and work-oriented (61.6%) lifestyles were identified. With some notable exceptions, working adults living in the urban core were having a more work-oriented lifestyle. Those with a balanced lifestyle were having a relatively compact zone of non-work activities around their homes but a relatively long commuting distance. Furthermore, working females tend to spend more time at home than their counterparts, regardless of their marital status and lifestyle. Overall, this interdisciplinary research demonstrates an attempt to integrate spatial, temporal, and sequential information for understanding people’s behavior in urban mobility research.

Thematic Integration Impairments in Primary Progressive Aphasia: Evidence From Eye-Tracking.

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a degenerative disease affecting language while leaving other cognitive facilities relatively unscathed. The agrammatic subtype of PPA (PPA-G) is characterized by agrammatic language production with impaired comprehension of noncanonical filler-gap syntactic structures, such as object-relatives [e.g., The sandwich that the girl ate (gap) was tasty], in which the filler (the sandwich) is displaced from the object position within the relative clause to a position preceding both the verb and the agent (the girl) and is replaced by a gap linked with the filler. One hypothesis suggests that the observed deficits of these structures reflect impaired thematic integration, including impaired prediction of the thematic role of the filler and impaired thematic integration at the gap, but spared structure building (i.e., creation of the gap). In the current study, we examined the on-line comprehension of object-relative and subject-relative clauses in healthy controls and individuals with agrammatic and logopenic PPA using eye-tracking. Eye-movement patterns in canonical subject-relative clause structures were essentially spared in both PPA groups. In contrast, eye-movement patterns in noncanonical object-relative clauses revealed delayed thematic prediction in both agrammatic and logopenic PPA, on-time structure building (i.e., gap-filling) in both groups, and abnormal thematic integration in agrammatic, but not logopenic, PPA. We argue that these results are consistent with the hypothesis that agrammatic comprehension deficits reflect impaired thematic integration.

Expertise as Sensorimotor Tuning: Perceptual Navigation Patterns Mark Representational Competence in Science

Representational competence in science is the ability to generate external representations (e.g. equations, graphs) of real-world phenomena, transform between these representations, and use them in an integrated fashion. Difficulties in achieving representational competence are often considered central to difficulties in learning science. Representational competence is indicative of domain expertise and is characterised by distinct problem-solving strategies. Eye-tracking studies have consistently demonstrated that experts employ unique perceptual attention (e.g. gaze-fixation) patterns while solving problems that involve different external representations. Here, we present a different strand of evidence, indicating that perceptual navigation patterns (eye movements) mark representational competence in science, in more specific ways than attention. Gaze behaviours of chemistry professors (experts) and undergraduate students (novices) were tracked as they individually performed a multi-representational-categorisation task and a chemical equation-balancing task. The following three-step analysis was performed on these data: (i) First, we independently calibrated the levels of representational competence of our participants through their performance in the categorisation task. (ii) Then, we compared these competence levels with the participants’ perceptual patterns (gaze behaviour) exhibited during the categorisation task. (iii) Finally, we analysed whether the identified perceptual patterns were specific to representational competence, or more general, through the results of the equation-balancing task. Our analysis of perceptual navigation (eye movements) provided further support to previous findings showing gaze-behaviour differences between experts and novices. Going further, our analysis indicated that experts deploy distinct eye-movement patterns, but specifically during representational competence-related problems. This suggests that representational competence is an embodied skill that fundamentally changes the tuning of the perceptual system, as argued by recent ‘field’ theories of cognition.

К ВОПРОСУ ОБ ОСОБЕННОСТЯХ АНАЛИЗА ДВИЖЕНИЙ ГЛАЗ В ПРОЦЕССЕ ВОСПРИЯТИЯ ЛИЦ

Background. The article is devoted to the study of the mechanisms of face perception when using the technology of eye-tracking. In the scientific literature, two processes are distinguished - analytical (perception of individual facial features) and holistic (perception of a general configuration of facial features). It is assumed that each of the mechanisms can be specifically manifested in patterns of eye movements during face perception. However, there is disagreement among the authors concerning the eye movements patterns which reflect the dominance of the holistic or analytic processing. We hypothesized that the contradictions in the interpretation of eye movement indicators in the studies of face perception may be associated with the features of the eye-tracker data processing, namely, with the specifics of identifying areas of interest (eyes, nose, bridge of the nose, lips), as well as with individual strategies of eye movements. Objective. Revealing the features of eye movements analysis in the process of facial perception. Method. A method for studying analytical and holistic processing in the task of assessing the attractiveness of upright and inverted faces using eye-tracking technology has been developed and tested. The eye-tracking data were analyzed for the entire sample using three types of processing, differing in the marking of the areas of interest (AOIs), and separately for two groups differing in eye movement strategies. The distinction of strategies was considered based on differences in the mean values of the fixation duration and the amplitude of saccades. Results. It was shown that: the presence of statistically significant differences of the dwell time in the AOIs between the condition of upright and inverted faces depended on the method of identifying these AOIs. It was shown that the distribution of the dwell time by zones is closely related to individual strategies of eye movements. Analysis of the data separately by groups showed significant differences in the distribution of the dwell time in the AOIs. Conclusion. When processing eye-tracking data obtained in the studies of face perception, it is necessary to consider individual strategies of eye movements, as well as the features associated with identifying AOIs. The absence of a single standard for identifying these areas can be the reason for inconsistency of the data about the holistic or analytical processing dominance. According to our data, the most effective for the analysis of holistic processing is a more detailed type of marking the AOIs, in which not only the main features (eyes, nose, mouth) are distinguished, but also the area of the nose bridge and nose.

Novel Audiovisual Warning to Support Collision Avoidance: Effect of Animation and Border on Driving Behavior and Eye Movement Pattern

Novel Audiovisual Warning to Support Collision Avoidance: Effect of Animation and Border on Driving Behavior and Eye Movement Pattern

Waveform characterisation and comparison of nystagmus eye-tracking signals

Objective. Pathological nystagmus is a symptom of oculomotor disease where the eyes oscillate involuntarily. The underlying cause of the nystagmus and the characteristics of the oscillatory eye movements are patient specific. An important part of clinical assessment in nystagmus patients is therefore to characterise different recorded eye-tracking signals, i.e. waveforms. Approach. A method for characterisation of the nystagmus waveform morphology is proposed. The method extracts local morphologic characteristics based on a sinusoidal model, and clusters these into a description of the complete signal. The clusters are used to characterise and compare recordings within and between patients and tasks. New metrics are proposed that can measure waveform similarity at different scales; from short signal segments up to entire signals, both within and between patients. Main results. The results show that the proposed method robustly can find the most prominent nystagmus waveforms in a recording. The method accurately identifies different eye movement patterns within and between patients and across different tasks. Significance. In conclusion, by allowing characterisation and comparison of nystagmus waveform patterns, the proposed method opens up for investigation and identification of the underlying condition in the individual patient, and for quantifying eye movements during tasks.

Refixation patterns of mind-wandering during real-world scene perception.

Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eye movement parameters, but have not explored how MW affects the sequential pattern of eye movements involved in making sense of complex visual information. Eye movements naturally unfold over time and this process may reveal novel information about cognitive processing during MW. The current study used Recurrence Quantification Analysis (Anderson, Bischof, Laidlaw, Risko, & Kingstone, 2013) to describe the pattern of refixations (fixations directed to previously inspected regions) during MW. Participants completed a real-world scene encoding task and responded to thought probes assessing intentional and unintentional MW. Both types of MW were associated with worse memory of the scenes. More important, RQA showed that scanpaths during unintentional MW were more repetitive than during on-task episodes, as indicated by a higher recurrence rate and more stereotypical fixation sequences. This increased repetitiveness suggests an adaptive response to processing failures through reexamining previous locations. Moreover, this increased repetitiveness contributed to fixations focusing on a smaller spatial scale of the stimuli. Finally, we were also able to validate several traditional measures: both intentional and unintentional MW were associated with fewer and longer fixations; eye-blinking increased numerically during both types of MW but the difference was only significant for unintentional MW. Overall, the results advanced our understanding of how visual processing is affected during MW by highlighting the sequential aspect of eye movements. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

A Data-Driven Framework for Intention Prediction via Eye Movement With Applications to Assistive Systems.

Fast and accurate human intention prediction can significantly advance the performance of assistive devices for patients with limited motor or communication abilities. Among available modalities, eye movement can be valuable for inferring the user's intention, as it can be tracked non-invasively. However, existing limited studies in this domain do not provide the level of accuracy required for the reliable operation of assistive systems. By taking a data-driven approach, this paper presents a new framework that utilizes the spatial and temporal patterns of eye movement along with deep learning to predict the user's intention. In the proposed framework, the spatial patterns of gaze are identified by clustering the gaze points based on their density over displayed images in order to find the regions of interest (ROIs). The temporal patterns of gaze are identified via hidden Markov models (HMMs) to find the transition sequence between ROIs. Transfer learning is utilized to identify the objects of interest in the displayed images. Finally, models are developed to predict the user's intention after completing the task as well as at early stages of the task. The proposed framework is evaluated in an experiment involving predicting intended daily-life activities. Results indicate that an average classification accuracy of 97.42% is achieved, which is considerably higher than existing gaze-based intention prediction studies.

Overground Walking Decreases Alpha Activity and Entrains Eye Movements in Humans.

Experiments in animal models have shown that running increases neuronal activity in early visual areas in light as well as in darkness. This suggests that visual processing is influenced by locomotion independent of visual input. Combining mobile electroencephalography, motion- and eye-tracking, we investigated the influence of overground free walking on cortical alpha activity (~10 Hz) and eye movements in healthy humans. Alpha activity has been considered a valuable marker of inhibition of sensory processing and shown to negatively correlate with neuronal firing rates. We found that walking led to a decrease in alpha activity over occipital cortex compared to standing. This decrease was present during walking in darkness as well as during light. Importantly, eye movements could not explain the change in alpha activity. Nevertheless, we found that walking and eye related movements were linked. While the blink rate increased with increasing walking speed independent of light or darkness, saccade rate was only significantly linked to walking speed in the light. Pupil size, on the other hand, was larger during darkness than during light, but only showed a modulation by walking in darkness. Analyzing the effect of walking with respect to the stride cycle, we further found that blinks and saccades preferentially occurred during the double support phase of walking. Alpha power, as shown previously, was lower during the swing phase than during the double support phase. We however could exclude the possibility that the alpha modulation was introduced by a walking movement induced change in electrode impedance. Overall, our work indicates that the human visual system is influenced by the current locomotion state of the body. This influence affects eye movement pattern as well as neuronal activity in sensory areas and might form part of an implicit strategy to optimally extract sensory information during locomotion.

Task-Dependent Eye-Movement Patterns in Viewing Art.

In art schools and classes for art history students are trained to pay attention to different aspects of an artwork, such as art movement characteristics and painting techniques. Experts are better at processing style and visual features of an artwork than nonprofessionals. Here we tested the hypothesis that experts in art use different, task-dependent viewing strategies than nonprofessionals when analyzing a piece of art. We compared a group of art history students with a group of students with no art education background, while viewing 36 paintings under three discrimination tasks. Participants were asked to determine the art movement, the date and the medium of the paintings. We analyzed behavioral and eye-movement data of 27 participants. Our observers adjusted their viewing strategies according to the task, resulting in longer fixation durations and shorter saccade amplitudes for the medium detection task. We found higher task accuracy and subjective confidence, less congruence and higher dispersion in fixation locations in experts. Expertise also influenced saccade metrics, biasing it towards larger saccade amplitudes, advocating a more holistic scanning strategy of experts in all three tasks.

Connecting Judgment Process and Accuracy of Student Teachers: Differences in Observation and Student Engagement Cues to Assess Student Characteristics

Teachers' ability to assess student cognitive and motivational-affective characteristics is a requirement to support individual students with adaptive teaching. However, teachers have difficulty in assessing the diversity among their students in terms of the intra-individual combinations of these characteristics in student profiles. Reasons for this challenge are assumed to lie in the behavioral and cognitive activities behind judgment processes. Particularly, the observation and utilization of diagnostic student cues, such as student engagement, might be an important factor. Hence, we investigated how student teachers with high and low judgment accuracy differ with regard to their eye movements as a behavioral and utilization of student cues as a cognitive activity. Forty-three participating student teachers observed a video vignette showing parts of a mathematics lesson to assess student characteristics of five target students, and reported which cues they used to form their judgment. Meanwhile, eye movements were tracked. Student teachers showed substantial diversity in their judgment accuracy. Those with a high judgment accuracy showed slight tendencies toward a more “experienced” pattern of eye movements with a higher number of fixations and shorter average fixation duration. Although all participants favored diagnostic student cues for their assessments, an epistemic network analysis indicated that student teachers with a high judgment accuracy utilized combinations of diagnostic student cues that clearly pointed to specific student profiles. Those with a low judgment accuracy had difficulty using distinct combinations of diagnostic cues. Findings highlight the power of behavioral and cognitive activities in judgment processes for explaining teacher performance of judgment accuracy.

The Effect of Task Complexity on Eye Movement and Multitasking Performance in Students With and Without ADHD

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that affects many individual’s ability to maintain and shift attention. Little is known about the connection between executive function and eye movement in individuals diagnosed with ADHD during multitasking. The objective of this research is to examine the relationship between patterns of eye movement and multitasking performance between students with and without ADHD. During the experiment, students with and without ADHD completed NASA’s Multi-Attribute Task Battery at both low and high task complexity. We found that students without ADHD showed higher error counts, higher workload ratings, and greater total number of fixations in the high task complexity than in the low task complexity. By understanding the relationship among eye movement, executive functioning, and mental workload, it is possible to gain insight in attention allocation in online learning environments and apply that knowledge to create tools for equal access to learning.

Contextual cueing in target absent trials by distractor-distractor associations.

Contextual cueing refers to finding a target more efficiently in repeated displays than in novel displays. However, conflicting results have been reported regarding whether target absent judgments can also be efficient in repeated displays. To resolve this controversy, we first tested 3 factors that might influence the strength of distractor-distractor associations and then investigated how such associations produced faster responses on repeated target absent trials by measuring the patterns of eye movements. The factors were the number of distractors, number of repeated configurations, and diversity of the distractors' properties. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that the diversity of the distractors was the only factor producing contextual cueing without a target. In Experiment 3, we recorded eye movements during a search task and found that the contextual cueing effect in the target absent condition was due to the lower number of fixations and larger mean saccadic amplitudes. Overall, these results suggest that the distractor-distractor associations, strengthened by the diversity of the distractors' properties, widened the attentional window. This enlarged window in turn helps people to reject more distractors at once and enables them to terminate a visual search faster in repeated target absent trials. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Reported Order of Importance Does not Predict Fixation Order when Viewing Driving Scenes

Distracted driving and its negative effects on driving performance are well documented. Eye movement patterns of distracted drivers have also been studied, though insight into what the driver specifically looks at is not as well understood. Researchers have studied eye movement metrics like, eyes-off-road glance times, time-to-first-fixation, among others, over an entire drive, but not what the driver is looking at in a specific moment in time. The current study used eye tracking to investigate what objects and areas people looked at in driving scenes and what they reported they would look at later in the same scenes. The results suggest that people look where they say they would look, but not in the order they reported they would look. This finding demonstrates that participants may scrutinize scenes differently at various times, but attend to the same objects or areas, indicating an associated importance, semantic constraints, and relevance for driving.

An Adaptive Fuzzy Modeling of Visual Attention in Real-world Interaction with Health Information System

Bottom-up and top-down processes are the two mechanisms of visual attention allocation, which allow people to efficiently spot task-relevant stimuli from cluttered and noisy environments, while staying alert to abnormalities within the visual field of view. This paper presents a preliminary study of the physicians’ real-life interaction with Information Communication Technology (ICT) in their own offices, along with extensively analyzing one case of an hour-long interaction of a physician, in which one performs a daily routine of reviewing patient electronic health records (EHRs) and writing diagnostic notes to the system interface. The physician interactions were captured in a time series data by recording display screen, keystrokes and mouse movements, also by simultaneously tracking eye movements. Then, a fuzzy-based model that can distinguish bottom-up and top-down processes were defined by using statistical random variables in terms of eye-movement patterns. The shift between those two attentional processes was detected by tracking the parametric changes of gaze behaviors as input: significant shift of fixation, sustained gazing, and fixation trajectory over time. Based on those gaze metrics, a random variable was assigned to the discrete probability of low (0), medium (0.5), or high (1.0), for a quantified fuzzy output, which was further machine-learned into an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) model in order to judge how a physician is likely to be dominated by a bottom-up or top-down processes in performing a task at that instance in time. On training the ANFIS model with three different types of fuzzy membership functions (Gaussian, triangular and trapezoidal), the model performed best with the Gaussian function (after 100 iterations, the predicted root mean-square error (RMSE) converged at 0.07%, yielding a smooth linear curve). For a proof-of concept, the model was implemented by using one physician’s gaze behaviors, of which the average, machine-learned fuzzy output probability indicated that the physician was veering toward bottom-up visual attention. This individualized, task-specific pattern of visual attention has implications for the designs of intelligent interface in ICT. Our ANFIS model can scale up to different physicians and tasks to predict the likelihood of bottom-up or top-down information processing based on real-world gaze behaviors.