This January, the Symposium: Semblance in present continuous, Pedro Ruiz Cabanillas, took place in the research center of San Marcos University, NEURON. Freddy Linares, director of Neurometrics, gave a presentation about visual attention. Here are some notes about his presentation.
Visual Attention and Eye-tracking
The amount of text in phone apps is increasing, and there is a predominance of audiovisual elements and immediate responses. Society is migrating toward a preference for consuming this kind of content. For that reason, understanding the dynamics of eye tracking is becoming more important today.
Biometric analysis
During our interaction with the environment, we register a series of information, which we capture through our senses and which, based on the reactions of our different organs, can be measured through some biometric technologies, such as EEG, Heart Rate, Facial Coding, Eyetracking, and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR).
Eye-Tracking
We understand eye tracking as the technology that allows us to objectively record the eye fixation points, saccadic movements, and pupillary dilation of certain participants when faced with a stimulus for each eye and measured in milliseconds.
Visual Attention
There are two types of visual attention:
Bottom-Up attention: this is automatic attention, the moment we find ourselves looking at something, in a supermarket, for example, without having been interested in looking at it.
Top-Down attention: occurs when one explicitly searches for something specific, such as a particular category.
Eye Tracking
Eye tracking devices have sensors that illuminate the back of the eye as if highlighting it from the inside out so that the pupil stands out. So, the camera that focuses on the eyes can identify it. This is then processed with software, and it calculates specifically what part of what one is looking at, be it a screen or a physical location, which is what needs to be recorded.
Fixed eye tracking devices analyze things that can be displayed on the screen, such as a website, an image, a video, or video games.
Eye tracking lenses are for when the person has to be moving, for example, someone walking in a supermarket, a vehicle driver, among other cases.
Technology adapts and is available to carry out research.
Some of the most important metrics are:
- time to first fixation (TTFF)
- total number of fixings (FIX)
- fixation duration (TD)
- fixings by area of interest
And report types:
- Gaze diagram
- Heat Map
- Opacity Map
We invite you to watch the full presentation at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS7E9_B6xrM