The VERP explorer: A tool for exploring eye movements of visual-cognitive tasks using recurrence plots

Abstract

Eye movement based analysis is becoming ever prevalent across domains with the commoditization of eye-tracking hardware. Eye-tracking datasets are, however, often complex and difficult to interpret and map to higher-level visual-cognitive behavior. Practitioners using eye tracking need tools to explore, characterize and quantify patterned structures in eye movements. In this paper, we introduce the VERP (Visualization of Eye movements with Recurrence Plots) Explorer, an interactive visual analysis tool for exploring eye movements during visual-cognitive tasks. The VERP Explorer couples conventional visualizations of eye movements with recurrence plots that reveal patterns of revisitation over time. We apply the VERP Explorer to the domain of medical checklist design, analyzing eye movements of doctors searching for information in checklists under time pressure.