Assessing Levels of Attention using Low Cost Eye Tracking
This research addresses the problem of measuring attention in real-world settings for applications like smartphone content adaptation, though it is incremental by extending lab-based methods to low-cost, mobile contexts.
The study investigated whether low-cost mobile eye tracking can quantify user attention levels during laptop interactions by analyzing pupil size changes in response to conflicting stimuli, finding it feasible to differentiate between sustained alertness and complex decision-making with nearly 10,000 observations over 2 weeks.
The emergence of mobile eye trackers embedded in next generation smartphones or VR displays will make it possible to trace not only what objects we look at but also the level of attention in a given situation. Exploring whether we can quantify the engagement of a user interacting with a laptop, we apply mobile eye tracking in an in-depth study over 2 weeks with nearly 10.000 observations to assess pupil size changes, related to attentional aspects of alertness, orientation and conflict resolution. Visually presenting conflicting cues and targets we hypothesize that it's feasible to measure the allocated effort when responding to confusing stimuli. Although such experiments are normally carried out in a lab, we are able to differentiate between sustained alertness and complex decision making even with low cost eye tracking "in the wild". From a quantified self perspective of individual behavioral adaptation, the correlations between the pupil size and the task dependent reaction time and error rates may longer term provide a foundation for modifying smartphone content and interaction to the users perceived level of attention.