Density of gaze points within a fixation and information processing behavior

Abstract

The use of eye movements to study cognitive effort is becoming increasingly important in HCI research. Eye movements are natural and frequently occurring human behavior. In particular fixations represent attention; people look at something when they want to acquire information from it. Users also tend to cluster their attention on informative regions of a visual stimulus. Thus, fixation duration is often used to measure attention and cognitive processing. Additionally, parameters such as pupil dilation and fixation durations have also been shown to be representative of information processing. In this study we argue that fixation density, defined as the number of gaze points divided by the total area of a fixation event, can serve as a proxy for information processing. As such, fixation density has a significant relationship with pupil data and fixation duration, which have been shown to be representative of cognitive effort and information processing.