Eye tracking insights in psychology and neuroscience Q1 2024

In daily life, both acoustic factors and social context can affect listening effort investment. In laboratory settings, information about listening effort has been deduced from pupil and cardiovascular responses independently. The extent to which these measures can jointly predict listening-related factors is unknown. Here we combined pupil and cardiovascular features to predict acoustic and contextual aspects of speech perception. Data were collected from 29 adults (mean = 64.6 years, SD = 9.2) with hearing loss. Participants performed a speech perc...Show more

• Tobii Pro Spectrum

Eye trackers are more and more often employed by scientists willing to learn more about how cultural heritage is perceived. However, designers very seldom make use of this technology, primarily perhaps due to its expensive and time-consuming nature. By choosing not to employ eye trackers they limit themselves to their own ideas and choices, at the same time forfeiting all the potential advantages of social consultations with non-professionals. One can easily imagine that their work and its effects would only benefit should a way be found to make eye-trac...Show more

• Tobii Pro X3-120
• Tobii Pro Lab

• Tobii Pro Nano

This paper focuses on the developmental process of eye trackers as accessible digital musical instruments (ADMIs) by outlining collaborative research that develops digital art and music creation and performance tools. These tools require eye movements only and are of interest to individuals with all types of mobility and particularly provide music-making options to users with limited mobility. Research grade and gaming eye-tracking technology is adapted with custom software to enable music creation and performance using eye movements only. The relationsh...Show more

• Tobii Pro Nano

Decision making is a multi-stage process that involves a series of rational evaluations. Recently, bodily arousal has been identified as a factor that mediates individual decisions, particularly during partner selection. The current study investigates pupil size changes in response to facial images of the opposite sex from controlled eye-tracking data (Experiment 1) and by reading out signals from front-facing smartphone cameras in noisy environments (Experiment 2). The aim is to enable automated decision-making in dating apps using arousal-based informa...Show more

• Tobii Pro Nano
• Tobii Pro Lab

Online learning has become increasingly popular in recent years, but the frequent occurrence of cognitive overload has been notably impacting both the learning experience and effectiveness. Therefore, based on optimizing online learning, this study proposes a research framework for cognitive load assessment of online learning based on three modal data: electroencephalography (EEG), eye tracking, and face. Following this framework, a neural network was used to construct a cognitive load assessment model for online learning that integrates multimodal data....Show more

• Tobii Pro X60 / X120 / T60 / T120

Objective. The enabling technology of visual prosthetics for the blind is making rapid progress. However, there are still uncertainties regarding the functional outcomes, which can depend on many design choices in the development. In visual prostheses with a head-mounted camera, a particularly challenging question is how to deal with the gaze-locked visual percept associated with spatial updating conflicts in the brain. The current study investigates a recently proposed compensation strategy based on gaze-contingent image processing with eye-tracking. Ga...Show more

• Tobii VR

In conditional autonomous driving, drivers are prone to experiencing incidental emotions during non-driving tasks, which are unrelated to driving decisions but may have negative effects on drivers' takeover performance. Voice assistants have been shown to regulate incidental emotions. Therefore, this study endowed the in-vehicle assistant with emotional voice capability, matching the emotional state of the driver in conditional autonomous driving, in order to explore the effect of regulating incidental emotions. Forty participants were enrolled in a driv...Show more

• Tobii Pro Glasses 2

Despite recent advancements in monitoring brain activity, causal relationships within the brain during responsibility identification in construction contracts remain unexplored. We aimed to understand the neural mechanisms involved in the cognitive components and their interactions related to contract text reading by delving into the brain mechanisms of contract responsibility identification. This study investigated students’ brain connectivity using electroencephalography (EEG) data during a text-based contract responsibility-identification task. It emp...Show more

• Tobii Pro Lab

Existing methods for simulating human visual attention primarily focus on 2D displays and limited research has been conducted on predicting visual attention in three-dimensional (3D) light field content. 3D light field displays provide a heightened sense of stereoscopic realism to viewers. To ensure that the content of the 3D light field display appears more consistent with human visual characteristics, we proposed a novel method for predicting human eye fixation in 3D light field display images. Firstly, we collected real eye movement data and utilized ...Show more

• Tobii Pro Spectrum

Human raters’ assessment of interpreting is a complex process. Previous researchers have mainly relied on verbal reports to examine this process. To advance our understanding, we conducted an empirical study, collecting raters’ eye-movement and retrospection data in a computerised interpreting assessment in which three groups of raters (n = 35) used an analytic rubric to assess 12 English-to-Chinese consecutive interpretations. We examined how the raters interacted with the source text, the rating scale, and the audio player displayed on the computer scr...Show more

• Tobii Pro Spectrum
• Tobii Pro Lab

This paper presents an enhanced framework for joint attention estimation. Visual attention is an important non-verbal cue to facilitate human-human social interaction. For example, it is natural for humans to look at the person who is speaking, and to make eye contact to indicate their interest in conversation. This unique capability leads to effective social interaction between humans, which is desirable in many intelligent systems to realize natural human-robot interaction. However, it is difficult to replicate humans' social gaze saliency on agents/ro...Show more

• Tobii Pro Glasses 3

Facilitation robots and agents play a significant role in enhancing the engagement and harmony level during social interactions. However, it is difficult for these intelligent systems to understand human states without humans wearing dedicated sensing devices to measure EEG or ECG responses, thus making implementations in the wild challenging. Non-verbal cues such as body language, gaze interaction, and voice activity could provide promising solutions because they implicitly represent the internal states of humans. This study explores the correlation bet...Show more

• Tobii Pro Glasses 3

Walking is among our most frequent and natural of voluntary behaviours, yet the consequences of locomotion upon perceptual and cognitive function remain largely unknown. Recent work has highlighted that although walking feels smooth and continuous, critical phases exist within each step for the successful coordination of perceptual and motor function. Here, we test whether these phasic demands impact upon visual perception, by assessing performance in a visual detection task during natural unencumbered walking. We finely sample visual performance over th...Show more

• Tobii VR

Research is equivocal on whether attention orienting is atypical in autism. This study investigated two types of attention orienting in autistic people and accounted for the potential confounders of alerting level, co-occurring symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety, age, and sex. Twenty-seven autistic participants (14 males; 9–43 years) and 22 age- and sex-matched non-autistic participants (13 males; 9–42 years) completed the exogenous and endogenous Posner tasks. Response time and pupillometric data were recorded. Autis...Show more

• Tobii Pro TX-300

Advances in wearable sensor technologies can be leveraged to investigate behavioral and physiological responses in task-induced stress environments. Reliable and valid multidimensional assessments are required to detect stress given its multidimensional nature. This study investigated the effect of recurrent task-induced acute stress on task performance, vagally mediated heart variability measures (vmHRV) and task-evoked pupillary response (TEPR). Task performance, vmHRV measures, and TEPR were collected from 32 study participants while they performed a ...Show more

• Tobii Pro Glasses 2
• Tobii Pro Lab

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) has long been employed to combat automated bots. It accomplishes this by utilizing distortion techniques and cognitive characteristics. When it comes to countering security attacks, cognitive CAPTCHA methods have proven to be more effective than other approaches. The advancement of eye-tracking technology has greatly improved human-computer interaction (HCI), enabling users to engage with computers without physical contact. This technology is widely used for studying att...Show more

• Tobii Pro X60 / X120 / T60 / T120
• Tobii Pro Studio

Multiple object tracking (MOT) and multiple identity tracking (MIT) each measure the ability to track moving objects visually. While prior investigators have mainly compared athletes and non-athletes on MOT, MIT more closely resembles dynamic real-life environments. Here we compared the performance and gaze behavior of handball players with non-athletes on both MOT and MIT. Since previous researchers have shown that MOT and MIT engage different eye movement strategies, we had participants track 3–5 targets among 10 moving objects. In MOT, the objects wer...Show more

• Tobii Pro X3-120
• Tobii Pro Lab

Small multiples are a popular visualization method, displaying different views of a dataset using multiple frames, often with the same scale and axes. However, there is a need to address their potential constraints, especially in the context of human cognitive capacity limits. These limits dictate the maximum information our mind can process at once. We explore the issue of capacity limitation by testing competing theories that describe how the number of frames shown in a display, the scale of the frames, and time constraints impact user performance with...Show more

• Tobii Pro Spectrum

Blinks, the closing and opening of the eyelids, are used in a wide array of fields where human function and behavior are studied. In data from video-based eye trackers, blink rate and duration are often estimated from the pupil-size signal. However, blinks and their parameters can be estimated only indirectly from this signal, since it does not explicitly contain information about the eyelid position. We ask whether blinks detected from an eye openness signal that estimates the distance between the eyelids (EO blinks) are comparable to blinks detected wi...Show more

• Tobii Pro Spectrum
• Psychopy
• Titta

Developing real-time automatic intuitive devices based on electroencephalography (EEG) to improve hazard recognition performance (HRP) is essential in construction engineering management. However, existing studies generally developed devices based on unimodal data, failing to distinguish the role played by brain activities in different visual areas and ignoring the possible existence of other psychological mechanisms. Therefore, this study aims to use multimodal data based on brain-eye synergy to predict HRP and reveal the cognitive mechanism of hazard r...Show more

• Tobii Pro Lab
• Brain Products

Analysis of operative fields is expected to aid in estimating procedural workflow and evaluating surgeons’ procedural skills by considering the temporal transitions during the progression of the surgery. This study aims to propose an automatic recognition system for the procedural workflow by employing machine learning techniques to identify and distinguish elements in the operative field, including body tissues such as fat, muscle, and dermis, along with surgical tools.

• Tobii Pro Glasses 2
• Tobii Pro Glasses 3

The diffusion of virtual reality urges to solve the problem of vergence-accommodation conflict arising when viewing stereoscopic displays, which causes visual stress. We addressed this issue with an approach based on reducing ocular convergence effort. In virtual environments, vergence can be controlled by manipulating the binocular separation of the virtual cameras. Using this technique, we implemented two quasi-3D conditions characterized by binocular image separations intermediate between 3D (stereoscopic) and 2D (monoscopic). In a first experiment, f...Show more

• Tobii VR

Clinical assessment procedures encounter challenges in terms of objectivity because they rely on subjective data. Computational psychiatry proposes overcoming this limitation by introducing biosignal-based assessments able to detect clinical biomarkers, while virtual reality (VR) can offer ecological settings for measurement. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder where many biosignals have been tested to improve assessment procedures. However, in ASD research there is a lack of studies systematically comparing biosignals for the...Show more

• Tobii Pro Glasses 2

As one of the means to promote college students’ energy-saving intention, knowledge education has received significant attention. However, the effects of different types of knowledge need to be explored in depth. Knowledge was classified from two dimensions in this paper: direct/specific and instrumental/emancipatory. Then, an eye-tracking experiment was used to explore the effects of different types of knowledge. Experimental groups were divided according to the types of knowledge. After knowledge education, the change degree of energy-saving intention ...Show more

• Tobii Pro Fusion
• Tobii Pro Lab

Text-to-speech (TTS) technology potentially benefits people with aphasia by presenting content through two modalities simultaneously; however, for this to help, eye fixations must synchronize with the auditory rendition of words. Researchers have yet to explore how often and to what extent people with aphasia achieve modality synchronization. This retrospective analysis examined the percent of words people with aphasia see and hear concurrently when reading passages presented via TTS technology.

• Tobii Pro Spectrum
• Tobii Pro Lab

Evidence has shown that older adults have lower accuracy in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks compared with young adults, but we are still unclear whether the difficulty in decoding mental states in older adults stems from not looking at the critical areas, and more so from the ageing Asian population. Most ToM studies use static images or short vignettes to measure ToM but these stimuli are dissimilar to everyday social interactions. We investigated this question using a dynamic task that measured both accuracy and error types, and examined the links between a...Show more

• Tobii Pro TX-300
• Tobii Pro Studio

Objective: To investigate the effects of anthropomorphism design on individuals’ comprehension of self-monitoring test results. In addition, we employed eye-tracking and event-related potential techniques to explore the underlying mechanisms. Materials and Methods: A within-group design was employed with presentation format (black-and-white neutral design, black-and-white anthropomorphic design, and colored anthropomorphic design) as independent variable. A total of 30 graduate students participated in an experiment in which they were instructed to perfo...Show more

• Tobii Pro Spectrum
• Psychopy

Effective use of gaze and head orientation can strengthen the sense of inclusion in multi-party interactions, including job interviews. Not making significant eye contact with the interlocutors, or not turning towards them, may be interpreted as disinterest, which could worsen job interview outcomes. This study aims to support the situational solo practice of gaze behavior and head orientation using a triadic (three-way) virtual reality (VR) job interview simulation. The system lets users encounter common interview questions and see how they share attent...Show more

• Tobii VR

To understand attentional preferences for normal and microtia ears.

• Tobii Pro Nano
• Tobii Pro Lab

The present study aimed to investigate the acute effects of aerobic exercise with different intensities on executive-related oculomotor control and cerebral dopamine/serotonin/norepinephrine metabolite concentrations in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). Twenty-eight PD individuals completed acute bouts of high-intensity interval exercise (HIIE), moderate-intensity continuous exercise (MICE), and REST sessions. The order of the three sessions was counterbalanced. We assessed the concentrations of homovanillic acid (HVA), 5-hydroxyindoleacetic aci...Show more

• Tobii Pro X3-120

Eye movement disorder in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) is less likely to appear when observing complex images compared with simple images. However, in case of auditory stimuli, meaningful stimuli can promote PD movement. Thus, we measured visual search movements with an eye tracker to investigate whether visual search changes in PD depending on the meaningfulness of visual stimuli; additionally, we measured event‐related potentials (ERPs) to neurophysiologically examine visual information processing in PD.

• Tobii Pro Spectrum
• Tobii Pro Lab

Introduction: Social disturbance is a significant autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptom. Action representation, which is a fundamental component of social interaction, can be investigated through kinesthetic motor imagery (KMI). KMI has been commonly studied with the well-developed laterality judgment paradigm, wherein participants are required to discriminate the laterality of a hand rotated by different angles along one or more axes. Here, we investigated the KMI processing in individuals with ASD by hand laterality judgment paradigm with eye-tracking...Show more

• Tobii Pro X60 / X120 / T60 / T120

Numerous studies have demonstrated that attention is quickly oriented towards threatening stimuli, and that this attentional bias is difficult to inhibit. The root cause(s) of this bias may be attributable to the affective (e.g., valence) or visual features (e.g., shape) of threats. In two experiments (behavioral, eye-tracking), we tested which features play a bigger role in the salience of threats. In both experiments, participants looked for a neutral target (butterfly, lock) among other neutral objects. In half of the trials a threatening (snake, gun)...Show more

• Tobii Pro TX-300
• Tobii Pro Studio

Dots on natural backgrounds can elicit significant pupillary constrictions within the entire image phase associated with parasympathetic activation, suggesting disgust rather than fear. Although studies have reported that dots on faces elicit stronger disgust than dots on non-face backgrounds, it remains unclear whether dots on a face elicit stronger pupil constrictions than non-face backgrounds. Pupillometry was used while viewing dots on faces and compared with luminance- and spatial frequency-controlled images (dots on phase-scrambled faces) and lumin...Show more

• Tobii Pro TX-300

The purpose of this study is to determine children's perception of secondary cleft lip deformity (SCLD) using objective eye tracking technology and subjective responses on a survey to understand pediatric perceptions of facial scarring.

• Tobii Pro Nano
• Tobii Pro Lab

PhysioLabXR is a Python-based open-source software platform for developing experiments for neuroscience and human–computer interaction (HCI) that involve real-time and multi-modal physiological data processing and interactive interfaces. PhysioLabXR provides native support for data sources such as electrophysiological sensors (e.g., EEG, EMG, and EOG), fNIRS, eye trackers, cameras, microphones, and screen capture, and implements the popular data transfer protocols Lab Streaming Layer (LSL; Kothe & Mandel, n.d.) and ZeroMQ (ZMQ; ZeroMQ, 2021). It features...Show more

• LSL
• Psychopy

Individuals with autism often experience heightened anxiety in workplace environments because of challenges in communication and sensory overload. As these experiences can result in negative self-image, promoting their self-efficacy in the workplace is crucial. Virtual reality (VR) systems have emerged as promising tools for enhancing the self-efficacy of individuals with autism in navigating social scenarios, aiding in the identification of anxiety-inducing situations, and preparing for real-world interactions. However, there is limited research explori...Show more

• Tobii VR

Sexual objectification mostly targets women and occurs whenever they are treated as bodies for the use or consumption of others and stripped of their full humanity. While research has mostly focused on sexual harassment and aggression as the main behavioral consequence of sexual objectification, only a few studies have tried to focus on more subtle consequences towards sexually objectified targets. Spontaneous mimicry is an implicit behavior that influences our social interactions in general. It involves the imitation of other people’s postures, gestures...Show more

• Tobii Pro X3-120
• Biopac

Engagement and emotion are critical components that significantly influence a reader’s experience during a reading task. Despite the crucial role of engagement and emotions in shaping our reading experience, accurately tracking these dynamic states during actual reading remains a significant challenge. This study bridges this gap by detecting engagement and emotion levels during a reading task by leveraging the power of state-of-the-art deep learning models and investigating the correlations between the engagement levels and emotions. An experiment was c...Show more

A core feature of autism involves difficulty perceiving and interpreting eye gaze shifts as nonverbal communicative signals. A hypothesis about the origins of this phenotype is that it emerges from developmentally different social visual attention (SVA). We developed Social Games for Autistic Adolescents (SAGA; Scherf et al. BMJ Open 8(9):e023682, 2018) as a serious game intervention for autistic individuals to discover the significance of eye gaze cues. Previously, we demonstrated the effectiveness of SAGA to improve the perception and understanding of ...Show more

• Tobii Pro X2-60 / X2-30
• Tobii Pro Studio

Eye movement perimetry (EMP) expresses the decline in visual field (VF) responsiveness based on the deviation in saccadic reaction times (SRTs) from their expected age-similar responses (normative database). Since ethnic dissimilarities tend to affect saccade parameters, we evaluated the effect of such a factor on SRT and its interaction with age, stimulus eccentricity, and intensity. 149 healthy adults, spread into five age groups, drawn from Indian and Dutch ethnicities underwent a customized EMP protocol integrated with a saccade task from which the S...Show more

• Tobii Pro X60 / X120 / T60 / T120

Time-compression is a technique that allows users to adjust the playback speed of audio recordings, but comprehension declines at higher speeds. Previous research has shown that under challenging auditory conditions people have a greater tendency to fixate regions closer to a speaker’s mouth. In the current study, we investigated whether there is a similar tendency to fixate the mouth region for time-compressed stimuli. Participants were presented with a brief audiovisual lecture at different speeds, while eye fixations were recorded, and comprehension w...Show more

• Tobii Pro X60 / X120 / T60 / T120
• Tobii Pro Lab

The phenomenon of multi-used stock photography in the news contradicts the photojournalism professional values of truthful and emotional depictions. This reality echoes other false images increasingly appearing in the media, including deepfakes and artificial intelligence. In the present study, a two (stock and staff photo) by two (positive and negative valence) quasi-experiment is conducted. The dependent variables include: 1) credibility; 2) self-reported arousal level; 3) emotional valence perceptions; 4) fixation duration; and 5) fixation count. Part...Show more

• Tobii Pro X3-120

The campus landscape contributes a lot to students’ mental and physical health. Students’ emotional attachment to landscape space is an important scientific basis for landscape design. This study used immersive virtual reality eye tracking supported by HTC Vivo Pro and an emotional attachment scale to investigate the relationship between different landscape elements and students’ visual behavior and emotional attachment. ErgoLab and SPSS were used to analyze the indicators. The results showed that: (1) Artificial elements were more likely to attract stud...Show more

• Tobii VR