Eye-tracking Study Research Articles

Teaching on Zoom In the Eyes of the Lecturer: An Eye Tracking Study

The shift to “Zoom” online learning in higher education, has aroused questions regarding the professional vision of lecturers- which is the core of this study. Since teaching on “Zoom” is screen based, it was possible to use an eye-tracking device to study lecturers’ vision gazes during teaching. The study describes ten lecturers vision behaviours by fixations and lecturer’s personal perception of vision. Main results revealed that sidelong variability between lecturers’ eye gazes, lecturers mainly focused on their presentations. They felt high vision interaction with participated students yet, more than fixations revealed. These results and more discussed in the study, emphasis the importance of understanding lecturers’ professional vision on “Zoom”, for improving the quality of teaching on this rather new method of teaching.

Infant responses to direct gaze and associations to autism: A live eye-tracking study.

When other people look directly towards us, we often respond by looking back at them, and such direct-gaze responses are important for establishing eye contact. Atypical eye contact is common in autism, but how and when this aspect of autism develops is not well understood. Here, we studied whether how much and how quickly infants respond to others' direct gaze is associated with autism in toddlerhood. We did this by measuring direct-gaze responses in a playful social interaction using live eye tracking. The study included 169 infants, of whom 129 had an elevated likelihood of developing autism due to having a first-degree family member with the condition, and 40 with typical likelihood of autism. In the elevated likelihood group, 35 were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at 3 years of age, and 94 were not. The results showed that infants in all three groups tended to increase their looking towards the adult's face after the adult looked directly at them. However, neither how much nor how quickly the infants responded to direct gaze by looking back at the adult reliably differentiated the infants with or without subsequent autism. While infants in the elevated likelihood of autism and subsequent diagnosis group tended to look away quicker from faces with direct gaze than infants in the typical likelihood group, this measure did not differentiate between the two elevated likelihood groups. We interpret the results as supporting the view that atypical direct-gaze responses are not early markers of autism.

Segmentation of Spoken Overlapping Ambiguity Strings in Chinese: An Eye-Tracking Study.

Using the printed-word paradigm with eye tracking, this study conducted three experiments to examine (a) how multiple words in spoken overlapping ambiguity strings (OASs) are activated, (b) how word frequency influences the word segmentation of spoken OASs, and (c) whether the multiple words in spoken OASs are activated competitively or independently. In this study, participants listened to a four-character spoken OAS (ABCD) and were presented with a visual display composed of a semantic associate of the "middle word" (BC; Experiments 1 and 2) or the "left word" (AB; Experiment 3) and two distractors. In Experiment 1, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be higher than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 2, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be either higher or lower than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 3, participants listened to either spoken OASs (ABCD) or spoken unambiguous strings (ABEF). In Experiment 1, we observed a significant semantic competition effect; that is, more fixations fell on the semantic competitors than on distractors, suggesting that the semantic information of the middle words in the spoken OASs was activated. In Experiment 2, the semantic competition effect was only observed in the high-frequency condition and was absent in the low-frequency condition. In Experiment 3, the results showed significant semantic competition effects for the left words under both conditions, and the observed effect was similar between the ambiguity condition and the control condition. These findings show that multiple words in spoken OASs are all activated and the activation level is modulated by word frequency. In addition, multiple words in the spoken OASs may be processed independently during spoken comprehension.

Agreement attraction in comprehension: do active dependencies and distractor position play a role?

ABSTRACT Across four eye-tracking studies and one self-paced reading study, we test whether attraction in subject-verb agreement is affected by (a) the relative linear positions of target and distractor, and (b) the active dependency status of the distractor. We find an effect of relative position, with greater attraction in retro-active interference configurations, where the distractor is linearly closer to the critical verb (Subject…Distractor…V) than in pro-active interference where it is more distant (Distractor…Subject…V). However, within pro-active interference configurations, attraction was not affected by the active dependency status of the distractor: attraction effects were similarly small whether or not the distractor was waiting to complete an upcoming dependency at the critical verb, with Bayes Factor analyses showing evidence in favour of a null effect of active dependency status. We discuss these findings in terms of the decay of activation, and whether such decay is affected by maintenance of features in memory.

Expertise differences in cognitive interpreting: A meta-analysis of eye tracking studies across four decades.

This meta-analytic research delves into the influence of expertise on cognitive interpreting, emphasizing time efficiency, accuracy, and cognitive effort, in alignment with prevailing expertise theories that link professional development and cognitive efficiency. The study assimilates empirical data from 18 eye-tracking studies conducted over the past four decades, encompassing a sample of 1581 interpreters. The objective is to elucidate the role of expertise in interpretative performance while tracing the evolution of these dynamics over time. Findings suggest that expert interpreters outperform novices in time efficiency and accuracy and exhibit lower cognitive effort, especially in sight and consecutive interpreting. This effect is particularly pronounced in the English-Chinese language pair and with the use of E-prime and Tobii eye-tracking systems. Further, fixation count and pupil size are essential metrics impacting cognitive effort. These findings have vital implications for interpreter training programs, suggesting a focus on expertise development to enhance efficiency and accuracy, reduce cognitive load, and emphasize the importance of sight interpreting as a foundational skill. The selection of technology and understanding of specific ocular metrics also emerged as essential for future research and practical applications in the interpreting industry. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Theory and Methods Linguistics > Cognitive.

Comprehending irony in text: evidence from scanpaths

ABSTRACT Eyetracking studies have shown that readers reread ironic phrases when resolving their meaning. Moreover, it has been shown that the timecourse of processing ironic meaning is affected by reader’s working memory capacity (WMC). Irony is a context-dependent phenomenon but using traditional eye-movement measures it is difficult to analyze processing beyond sentence-level. A promising method to study individual differences in irony processing at the paragraph-level is scanpath analysis. In the present experiment, we analyzed whether individual differences in WMC are reflected in scanpaths during reading ironic stories by combining data from two previous eye-tracking studies (N = 120). The results revealed three different reading patterns: fast-and-linear reading, selective reading, and nonselective rereading. The readers predominantly used the fast-and-linear reading pattern for ironic and literal stories. However, readers were less likely to use the nonselective rereading pattern with ironic than literal texts. The reading patterns for ironic stories were modulated by WMC. Results showed that scanpaths captured differences missed by standard measures, showing it to be a valuable tool to study individual differences in irony processing.

The role of connection with nature in empirical studies with physiological measurements: a systematic literature review.

It is well described that exposure to nature reduces physiological stress, and connectedness to nature can have a moderating effect. However, few studies have so far examined the construction of the connection with nature in relation to physiological processes. In this systematic review, we collected studies that used a physiological measure and included a scale to measure connectedness to nature. Our aim was to assess the role of nature relatedness at the level of physiological processes and to summarize the results published so far. Our review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement. A literature search was conducted in 3 different databases (PubMed, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar). As keywords, we used all the different questionnaires that measure connectedness to nature, combined with terms related to physiological measures. After final screening, 28 articles met the inclusion criteria for the review. The studies were very diverse in terms of purpose, intervention and methods, so narrative synthesis was conducted without measures of effect. We found evidence for a mediating effect of nature connectedness on the associations between nature exposure and cognitive function, brain activity, blood pressure, cortisol level and mental health. Studies investigating nature relatedness as state-like characteristics have shown that exposure to nature increases the level of connection to nature. Eye-tracking studies have confirmed that this measurement method can be used to investigate nature relatedness at a physiological level, which could be a useful complement to self-report questionnaires in future studies.

Understanding Consumers’ Visual Attention in Mobile Advertisements: An Ambulatory Eye-Tracking Study with Machine Learning Techniques

As mobile devices have become a necessity in our daily lives, mobile advertising is also prevalent. Accordingly, it is critical for practitioners to understand how consumers visually attend to mobile advertisements. One popular way of doing so is via eye-tracking methodology. However, scant eye-tracking research exists in mobile settings due to technical challenges, e.g., cumbersome data annotation. To tackle these challenges, the authors propose an object-detection machine learning (ML) algorithm—You Only Look Once (YOLO) v3—to analyze eye-tracking videos automatically. Moreover, we extend the original YOLO v3 model by developing a novel algorithm to optimize the analysis of eye-tracking data collected from mobile devices. Through a lab experiment, we investigate how two types of ad elements (i.e., textual vs. pictorial) and shopping devices (i.e., mobile vs. PC) affect consumers’ visual attention. Our findings suggest that (1) textual ad elements receive more attention than pictorial ones, and such differences are more pronounced in ads on mobile devices than those on PCs; and (2) mobile ads receive less attention than PC ads. Our findings provide managerial insights into developing effective digital advertising strategies to improve consumers’ visual attention in online and mobile advertisements.

Processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish: evidence from the Visual World Paradigm

This paper presents a psycholinguistic study of the processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish, which has three gender categories (masculine, feminine, neuter), as well as what language-internal factors impact this processing. Results from an eye-tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm show that, during real-time language comprehension, adult monolingual speakers of Polish use cues from gender agreement on a prenominal adjective to anticipate the upcoming noun. An exploration of language-internal factors affecting this anticipatory processing finds this effect in all three genders, suggesting that encountering the relevant nominative-case agreement morpheme during language comprehension leads to automatic activation of a gender node in the mental lexicon, consistent with the literature on other languages with grammatical gender. These results hold true for the neuter agreement morpheme, despite the fact that this morpheme also instantiates default gender agreement in the language and is syncretic with the nominative plural agreement morpheme in all three genders. Further investigation finds that, while agreement morphemes for each gender prompt anticipatory processing, the reliability of a masculine agreement morpheme as a cue to gender is reduced in the presence of a neuter distractor, and vice versa. This raises questions regarding phonological proximity between the realized suffix and the suffix that would cue the distractor, with implications for the acquisition and processing of gender agreement morphology in Polish.

Brain computed tomography reading of stroke patients by resident doctors from different medical specialities: An eye-tracking study

BackgroundUsing the eye-tracking technique, our work aimed to examine whether difference in clinical background may affect the training outcome of resident doctors’ interpretation skills and reading behaviour related to brain computed tomography (CT). MethodsTwelve resident doctors in the neurology, radiology, and emergency departments were recruited. Each participant had to read CT images of the brain for two cases. We evaluated each participant’s accuracy of lesion identification. We also used the eye-tracking technique to assess reading behaviour. We recorded dwell times, fixation counts, run counts, and first-run dwell times of target lesions to evaluate visual attention. Transition entropy was applied to assess the temporal relations and spatial dynamics of systematic image reading. ResultsThe eye-tracking results showed that the image reading sequence examined by transition entropy was comparable among resident doctors from different medical specialties (p = 0.82). However, the dwell time of the target lesions was shorter for the resident doctors from the neurology department (4828.63 ms, p = 0.01) than for those from the resident doctors from the radiology (6275.88 ms) and emergency (5305.00 ms) departments. The eye-tracking results in individual areas of interest only showed differences in the eye-tracking performance of the first-run dwell time (p = 0.05) in the anterior cerebral falx. DiscussionOur findings demonstrate that resident doctors from different medical specialties may achieve similar imaging reading patterns for brain CT. This may mitigate queries regarding the influence of different backgrounds on training outcomes.

Emotion Recognition in Children and Adolescents with ASD and ADHD: a Systematic Review

AbstractChildren and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) show difficulties in recognizing emotions. Similarities and differences between these two clinical groups’ emotion recognition (ER) have been little explored. This systematic review aims to summarize the results of comparative studies that included samples of cases with ASD and ADHD. A systematic search was conducted following PRISMA guidelines, and 24 papers were included. Behavioral, brain-based, and eye-tracking studies were considered, paying particular attention to the different methods used and to the characteristics of the study groups, such as cognitive factors, age-related differences, and comorbidities. This review provides some insight on the complex process of ER in ASD and ADHD, highlighting important directions for future research.

Perception of aesthetic features after surgical treatment of craniofacial malformations by observers of the same age: An eye-tracking study

The aim of this study is to evaluate where exactly children and adolescents of the same group look when they interact with each other, and attempt to record and analyse the data recorded by eye-tracking technology. Materials and methods60 subjects participated in the study, evenly divided into three age categories of 20 each in pre-school/primary school age (5–9 years), early adolescence (10–14 years) and late adolescence/transition to adulthood (15–19 years). Age groups were matched and categorized to be used both for creating the picture series and testing. Photographs of patients with both unilateral and bilateral cleft lip and palate were used to create the series of images which consisted of a total of 15 photos, 5 of which were photos of patients with surgically treated cleft deformity and 10 control photos with healthy faces, that were presented in random order. Using the eye-tracking module, the data on "area of first view" (area of initial attention), "area with longest view" (area of sustained attention), "time until view in this area" (time of initial attention) and "frequency of view in each area" (time of sustained attention) were calculated. ResultsAcross all groups, there was no significant difference for the individual regions for the parameters of initial attention (area of first view), while the time until first fixation of one of the AOIs (time until view in this area) was significant for all facial regions. A predictable path of the facial scan is abandoned when secondary facial deformities are present and attention is focused more on the region of an existing deformity, which are the nose and mouth regions. ConclusionsThere are significant differences in both male and female participants' viewing of faces with and without secondary cleft deformity. While in the age group of the younger test persons it was still the mouth region that received special attention from the male viewers, this shifted in the male test persons of the middle age group to the nose region, which was fixed significantly more often and faster. In the female participants, the mouth and nose regions were each looked at for twice as long compared to the healthy faces, making both the mouth and the nose region are in the focus of observation.

Is vowel devoicing in Japanese lexically specified?—An eye-tracking study

In Tokyo Japanese, high vowels can be devoiced typically between voiceless consonants. Traditionally, devoiced vowels are treated as allophones of corresponding vowels in which the devoicing process is a result of phonetic implementation commonly affected by speech rate. An opposing view is that devoicing is lexically specified since there are cases of interactions between devoicing and compounding that can be naturally accounted for by lexical phonology. To investigate this issue, the present study conducted an eye-tracking experiment. Edited mismatch stimuli where vowels were voiced before a voiceless consonant (M1) or devoiced before a voiced consonant (M2) were auditorily presented with pictures of the target word, a competing word, and a distractor presented visually. This design is based on a prediction that M1 and M2 invoke confusion in the recognition process if devoicing is specified lexically. Sixteen participants were recruited for an experiment of about 200 trials. Results showed that only M1 stimuli invoked a different pattern of fixation rates than M2 and other natural stimuli. This can be interpreted as partial support for the traditional view of devoicing. The asymmetry between M1 and M2 calls for an account based on markedness theory which is independent of the lexical specification.

Preschoolers Can Match the Facial and Bodily Emotional Expressions: A Behavior and Eye-Tracking Study

The preschool age is an important period in the development of children’s emotional abilities. The face and body are both vital carriers of emotional information and adults readily match the emotional cues coming from these two modalities. However, it is unknown whether preschoolers have this ability or not. In the current study, 36 preschoolers (22 boys, aged 44–73 months old) participated in an emotional facial and bodily matching test including angry, happy, and neutral expressions (Experiment 1) and an eye-tracking experiment (Experiment 2). The results show that: (1) preschoolers can accurately match three categories of facial and bodily expressions of emotion (all matching rates were above 93% in Experiment 1); (2) robust emotional matching was observed across conditions in Experiment 2. That is, the eye-tracking indexes including the total fixation duration, the first fixation duration, and the fixation count, all indicated that the preschoolers more thoroughly processed bodily expressions of emotion which were congruent to the facial expressions compared to incongruent bodily expressions of emotion. This study shows that the ability to match facial and bodily expressions of emotion develops at an early age. Preschool children have already reached a high level of this ability.

Positive effects of employee psychological assistance programs on HR patients with social anxiety disorder

BackgroundWith the continuous improvement of employees’ humanized needs, more and more enterprises have set up employee psychological assistance programs. The way of diagnosing and advising organizations and employees through professionals, providing professional guidance, training and counseling is also of certain research value for the treatment of HR patients with social anxiety disorder.Subjects and MethodsThe study selected 38 people with SAD and 22 healthy controls to complete the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. At the same time, eye tracking technology was used to investigate the eye movement attention of the two groups of subjects to their own faces with different emotions, and the changes in symptoms and eye movement characteristics of SAD patients were followed up for 4 weeks.ResultsThe healthy group scored 9.950±4.87, and before the EPA intervention, SADHR patients had a higher score on the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale of 77.610±24.00. After the EPA intervention, the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale score of SADHR patients was significantly reduced by 52.6% compared with the previous one. The results of eye tracking studies changed, with a significant increase in the order of first fixation points in the 4-week region of interest.ConclusionsPatients with SADHR have a high level of self-attention, and most of them are negative and have low self-evaluation. After using the EPA intervention, the self-evaluation of SADHR patients improved. Social anxiety symptoms were not significantly correlated with eye movement features of one’s own face.

The Effects of Background Music on The Screen-Based Reading Material Among University Students: An Eye Tracking Study

Reading performance is a crucial skill that can predict success in education. Many factors can influence reading performances, such as background music and perceiving the sentences while reading. This study explores the effects of music on screen-based reading materials among health sciences university students. One hundred twelve participants from The National University of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur Campus, participated in this study. Participants were asked to read and understand the general theme text given on the computer screen. The participants were segregated into two groups according to their preferred way of reading, either music or non-music. Then, participants in the music group randomly listened to rap or classic music (rap = 86 BPM or classic = 161 BPM) using a Sony headphone (MDR-XB450AP) while reading. The reading duration was recorded, and reading comprehension was determined by the correct answers to four questions based on the text. A webcam-based GazeRecorder software was used to measure the eye-tracking metrics (dwell time, first view time, and number of AOI views) on the area of interest (AOI). Reading speed is significantly associated with reading comprehension (rs = -0.1933, p = 0.0412). Reading duration, reading speed, and reading comprehension were not considerably different while listening to and not listening to music. The results show a similar pattern in all eye-tracking metrics. However, the reading duration while listening to rap music (2.68 ± 1.94 minutes) was significantly shorter (U = 299.5, p = 0.02642) compared to classical music (3.42 ± 1.91 minutes). Moreover, reading speed is significantly higher (U = 299.5, p = 0.02642) while listening to rap music (139.38 ± 102.96 wpm) as compared to classical music (109.47 ± 51.51 wpm). Music seems not to affect reading performance and eye-tracking metrics. Despite this, rap music can improve reading performance by reducing the reading duration and increasing reading speed.

The Unexpected Lightness of the Main Verb: An Eye-Tracking Study on Relative Clauses and Trace Reactivation

A few studies on relative-clause processing report an unexpected facilitatory effect on the matrix verb that follows an Object Relative (ORC) clause (e.g. Staub, Dillon and Clifton jr. 2017). In this study we present the results of a novel eye-tracking experiment that replicated this effect on Italian. The advantage of ORCs is discussed under the hypothesis that subject-verb agreement in the matrix benefits from a general trace-reactivation mechanisms, subsumed from activation-based retrieval models (Lewis and Vasishth 2005).

Sadness facilitates “deeper” reading comprehension: a behavioural and eye tracking study

ABSTRACT Reading is one of the most common everyday activities, yet research elucidating how affective influence reading processes and outcomes is sparse with inconsistent results. To investigate this question, we randomly assigned participants (N = 136) to happiness (positive affect), sadness (negative affect), and neutral video-induction conditions prior to engaging in self-paced reading of a long, complex science text. Participants completed assessments targeting multiple levels of comprehension (e.g. recognising factual information, integrating different textual components, and open-ended responses of concepts from memory) after reading and after a week-long delay. Results indicated that the Sadness (vs. Happiness) condition had higher comprehension scores, with the largest effects emerging for assessments targeting deeper levels comprehension immediately after reading. Eye-tracking analyses revealed that such benefits may be partly driven by sustained attentional focus over the 20-minute reading session. We discuss results with respect to theories on affect, cognition, and text comprehension.

Visual search in Alzheimer's disease and amnestic mild cognitive impairment: An eye-tracking study.

Visual search impairment is a potential cognitive marker for Alzheimer's disease (AD) and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). The aim of this study is to compare eye movements during visual tracking in AD and aMCI patients versus healthy controls (HCs). A prospective cohort study included 32 AD and 37 aMCI patients, and 33 HCs. Each participant was asked to look at the target object in a visual stimulus containing one target and eight distractors, and eye movements were recorded with EyeLink 1000 Plus. AD patients had fewer fixations and shorter target fixation duration than aMCI patients and HCs. Fixation durations were also shorter in aMCI patients compared to HCs. Also, AD patients were more fixated on distractors than HCs. Our findings revealed that visual search is impaired in the early stages of AD and even aMCI, highlighting the importance of addressing visual processes in the Alzheimer's continuum. AD patients looked to distractors more and longer than the target compared to aMCI patients and older healthy individuals. aMCI patients had an impaired visual search pattern compared to healthy controls, just like patients with AD. The visual search task differentiated AD and aMCI patients from healthy individuals without dementia.

An Eye-Tracking Study of GBL Motivators and Learner Behavior

Despite the significant positive characteristics game-based learning offers to pupil learning and assessment, preserving pupils’ interest and keeping them engaged in an educational game is still a challenge. To this end, the study and implementation of motivation mechanisms in educational games are considered crucial. Typical examples of motivators in electronic games include points (coins), avatar icons, visualization of achievement levels, NPCs (non-player characters) giving helpful information to users, children-friendly graphics and sound effects, comparison with classmates, and leaderboards. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary study of the effectiveness of these GBL motivators in MG, an educational game for practicing and assessing multiplication skills. The study combined eye-tracking with a short, semi-structured interview session with the four elementary school students that took part in the experiment. Eye-tracking provides detailed monitoring and visualization of gaze behavior in the form of fixation (point and duration of visual focus) and saccade sequences. Given that the way users allocate their visual focus is spontaneous, the data collected and analyzed by eye-tracking are unbiased and give a new spectrum of insight into how users perceive a visual stimulus. In this study, we investigate how users visually respond to the implemented motivators and their visual behavior when deciding between two or more available answers and when given feedback after a wrong answer. The paper discusses useful eye-tracking metrics, provides adequate visualizations of the main findings, and concludes with the ways eye-tracking can help education scientists and practitioners gain a better understanding of the behavior of users of GBL applications and the motivation mechanisms they support.