Eye movements during information processing tasks: Individual differences and cultural effects

Abstract

The eye movements of native English speakers, native Chinese speakers, and bilingual Chinese/English speakers who were either born in China (and moved to the US at an early age) or in the US were recorded during six tasks: (1) reading, (2) face processing, (3) scene perception, (4) visual search, (5) counting Chinese characters in a passage of text, and (6) visual search for Chinese characters. Across the different groups, there was a strong tendency for consistency in eye movement behavior; if fixation durations of a given viewer were long on one task, they tended to be long on other tasks (and the same tended to be true for saccade size). Some tasks, notably reading, did not conform to this pattern. Furthermore, experience with a given writing system had a large impact on fixation durations and saccade lengths. With respect to cultural differences, there was little evidence that Chinese participants spent more time looking at the background information (and, conversely less time looking at the foreground information) than the American participants. Also, Chinese participants' fixations were more numerous and of shorter duration than those of their American counterparts while viewing faces and scenes, and counting Chinese characters in text.

It depends on how you look at it: Scanpath comparison in multiple dimensions with MultiMatch, a vector-based approach

“…It supports findings that fixation duration is idiosyncratic (Andrews & Coppola, 1999;Rayner, Li, Williams, Cave, & Well, 2007), but it is also likely to reflect the fact that real eye movement data contain instances of refixations on the target dots, as well as occurrences in which saccades are launched from farther away when the dots are not presented in close proximity to each other. This would create a variable time lag before the target fixation commences that is absent in the ideal data.…”

“…If we make the task easier-by increasing the targetdistractor discriminability, for instance-fixations become shorter, and saccades longer and more direct. This is further compounded by the fact that fixation durations are highly idiosyncratic (Andrews & Coppola, 1999;Rayner et al, 2007): It is likely that duration similarity will be higher in MultiMatch when comparing the scanpaths of the same person on different images than when comparing different people on the same image. This demonstrates the importance of knowing your stimuli, and the potential search strategies that your participants will use, before making predictions on the basis of the duration and length dimensions.…”

Effects of Viewing Time, Fixations, and Viewing Strategies on Visual Memory for Briefly Presented Natural Objects

“…Thus, we have shown a novel influence on fixation durations. It has been reported that fixation durations are sensitive to a number of factors, like the serial position of an item (SaintAubin et al, 2007), culture (Rayner et al, 2007), stimulus luminance (Loftus, 1985), and mask onset delays (Rayner et al, 2009), but to our knowledge it has not been previously shown that the use of blocked versus interleaved design plays a role.…”

“…Typical fixations during scene viewing last an average of approximately 300 ms (Hollingworth & Henderson, 2002). Several factors have been found to influence fixation durations, including: the serial position of an item (Saint-Aubin, Tremblay, & Jalbert, 2007), culture (Rayner, Li, Williams, Cave, & Well, 2007), stimulus luminance (Loftus, 1985), and the duration of the delay with which a mask appeared after fixation (Rayner, Smith, Malcolm, & Henderson, 2009). Thus, fixation durations are not fixed but are influenced by several factors, possibly reflecting top-down influences.…”

A Neuroscience Approach in User Satisfaction Evaluation in Maritime Education

“…This method measuring the effect of personalization could be the relationship of users' actual behaviour in a hypermedia environment with theories that raise the issue of individual preferences and differences (Tsianos et al, 2009). The notion that there are individual differences in eye movement behaviour in information processing has already been supported at a cultural level (Rayner et al, 2007), at the level of gender differences (Mueller et al, 2008), and even in relation to cognitive style (verbal-analytic versus spatial-holistic) (Galin and Ornstein, 1974).…”