Fragmented Visual Attention in Web Browsing: Weibull Analysis of Item Visit Times

Abstract

Users often browse the web in an exploratory way, inspecting what they find interesting without a specific goal. However, the temporal dynamics of visual attention during such sessions, emerging when users gaze from one item to another, are not well understood. In this paper, we examine how people distribute visual attention among content items when browsing news. Distribution of visual attention is studied in a controlled experiment, wherein eye-tracking data and web logs are collected for 18 participants exploring newsfeeds in a single- and multi-column layout. Behavior is modeled using Weibull analysis of item (article) visit times, which describes these visits via quantities like durations and frequencies of switching focused item. Bayesian inference is used to quantify uncertainty. The results suggest that visual attention in browsing is fragmented, and affected by the number, properties and composition of the items visible on the viewport. We connect these findings to previous work explaining information-seeking behavior through cost-benefit judgments.

Morphological Study of a Self-Organized Corrole Film on a Gold Crystal, both in Solution and after Solvent Evaporation

“…The Weibull distribution has a lot of applications in many different fields of science and technology, − in particular, among others, it has been profitably employed to describe the size of particles obtained in fragmentation processes (e.g., grinding, milling, and crushing operations). − It goes without saying that our size distribution has to do with a kind of “particles” of completely different nature: they are holes, namely lack of molecules. This simple fact is already interesting in itself, and we wondered if we were dealing with something more general.…”