Viewing Behavior in Complex Passages - An Exploratory Eye-tracking Study

There have been multiple studies focusing on how visual arrangements can impact the viewing behavior of online content, but little research has been done that evaluates the effect of complexity of textual information on viewing patterns. To fill this gap, we studied how users view longer textual passages and how text simplification could impact the viewing pattern for such passages. We extracted a relatively complex passage (18th-grade reading difficulty level) from GRE sample tests. We then simplified it to 12th grade reading difficulty level using a set of guidelines developed in prior studies. After that, we ran an eye-tracking experiment with 65 participants. Half participants were asked to read the original passage, and the rest were asked to read the simplified version. The results showed that text simplification substantially impacted the viewing behavior, notably it increased attention to the last parts of the passage

Pupillometry as a tool to study expertise in medicine

Background Pupillometry has been studied as a physiological marker for quantifying cognitive load since the early 1960s. It has been established that small changes in pupillary size can provide an index of the cognitive load of a participant as he/she performs a mental task. The utility of pupillometry as a measure of expertise is less well established, although recent research in the fields of education, medicine and psychology indicates that differences in pupillary size during domain-specific tasks allows differentiation between experts and novices in appropriately designed experiments.Purpose The goal of this review is to explore the existing body of evidence for the use of pupillometry as a measure of expertise and to identify its strengths and constraints within the context of expertise research in the medical sciences.Results Pupillometry is a robust metric that allows researchers to better understand cognitive load in medical practitioners with varying levels of expertise. In medical expertise research, it has been used to study surgeons, anesthetists and emergency physicians. Its strengths include its ability to provide quantitative and objective outputs, to be measured unobtrusively with new technology and to be precisely computed as cognitive load changes over the course of completion of a task. Constraints associated with this methodology include its potential inaccuracy with changes in ambient light and pupillary accommodation as well as the need for relatively expensive equipment. Conclusion With recent technological advances, pupillometry has become a simple and robust method for quantifying physiological changes attributable to cognitive load and is increasingly being utilized in medical education. It can be used as a reliable marker of mental effort and has been shown to differentiate levels of expertise in medical practitioners