Which symbols, features, and regions are visually attended in metro maps?

Abstract

We conducted an eye tracking study with 40 participants to understand which visual objects like metro lines, stations, interchange points, specific symbols, or extra information like labels or legends are visually attended during a free examination question scenario. In this study we did not ask a specific question like a route finding task as in a previous eye tracking study, but we let the study participants freely inspect a displayed metro map system for 20 s each. We used 24 different metro maps with the same characteristics, but varied between color coded maps and gray scale ones. Understanding the visual scanning behavior of people while inspecting metro maps is an important, but also challenging task. But positively, the analysis of such eye movement data can support a map designer to produce better maps, in particular, to find out which regions are visually attended first or most frequently, maybe to guide the viewer. The visually attended regions and objects can be a key aspect in a metro map to make them easier and faster comprehensible and finally, useful for travellers in foreign and unknown cities all over the world. The major result from our eye tracking experiment is that the study participants significantly inspect symbols that pop out from the map like the airport signs or the map legends which belong to the key features in maps. Moreover, dense regions are more frequently attended than sparse ones. The visual attention maps of colored and gray scale maps look very similar.