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Understanding the relationship between microsaccades and pupil dilation

Published: 25 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Existing literature reveals little information about the relationship between microsaccade rate and the average change in pupil size. There is a need to investigate this relationship and how the microsaccade rate may be relevant to cognitive load. In our study, we compared the microsaccade rate to the average change in pupil size during eight experimental conditions. Four of them were considered fixation conditions (subjects look at a fixation cross in each visual scene) and four were free-viewing conditions (subjects are free to move their eyes over the visual scene). We analyzed the change in pupil size and microsaccade rate for the first part of each task and as well as the entire task in all conditions. We discovered a significant correlation between the microsaccade rate and the average change in pupil size during the first part of each task, and comparable characteristics throughout the entire task. Then we measured the data for only one of the experimental conditions in free-viewing that involves a search task to understand comparable characteristics related to cognitive load. We found that there is a correlation between the microsaccade and pupil data. We hope that this finding will help further the understanding of the relative function of microsaccades and use it to support cognitive load response and pupil measurement.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Using Eye Tracking to Understand Learners' Attention in Online Live Teaching2023 5th International Conference on Computer Science and Technologies in Education (CSTE)10.1109/CSTE59648.2023.00058(293-297)Online publication date: Apr-2023
  • (2022)Building a decoder of perceptual decisions from microsaccades and pupil sizeFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2022.94285913Online publication date: 13-Sep-2022

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ETRA '19: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications
    June 2019
    623 pages
    ISBN:9781450367097
    DOI:10.1145/3314111
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 25 June 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. eye movements
    2. fixation
    3. free-viewing
    4. microsaccade rate
    5. pupil size

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    • (2023)Using Eye Tracking to Understand Learners' Attention in Online Live Teaching2023 5th International Conference on Computer Science and Technologies in Education (CSTE)10.1109/CSTE59648.2023.00058(293-297)Online publication date: Apr-2023
    • (2022)Building a decoder of perceptual decisions from microsaccades and pupil sizeFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2022.94285913Online publication date: 13-Sep-2022

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