Visual analytics methodology for eye movement studies

Eye movement analysis is gaining popularity as a tool for evaluation of visual displays and interfaces. However, the existing methods and tools for analyzing eye movements and scanpaths are limited in terms of the tasks they can support and effectiveness for large data and data with high variation. We have performed an extensive empirical evaluation of a broad range of visual analytics methods used in analysis of geographic movement data. The methods have been tested for the applicability to eye tracking data and the capability to extract useful knowledge about users' viewing behaviors. This allowed us to select the suitable methods and match them to possible analysis tasks they can support. The paper describes how the methods work in application to eye tracking data and provides guidelines for method selection depending on the analysis tasks

Opinion mining and sentiment analysis in marketing communications: a science mapping analysis in Web of Science (1998–2018)

Opinion mining and sentiment analysis has become ubiquitous in our society, with applications in online searching, computer vision, image understanding, artificial intelligence and marketing communications (MarCom). Within this context, opinion mining and sentiment analysis in marketing communications (OMSAMC) has a strong role in the development of the field by allowing us to understand whether people are satisfied or dissatisfied with our service or product in order to subsequently analyze the strengths and weaknesses of those consumer experiences. To the best of our knowledge, there is no science mapping analysis covering the research about opinion mining and sentiment analysis in the MarCom ecosystem. In this study, we perform a science mapping analysis on the OMSAMC research, in order to provide an overview of the scientific work during the last two decades in this interdisciplinary area and to show trends that could be the basis for future developments in the field. This study was carried out using VOSviewer, CitNetExplorer and InCites based on results from Web of Science (WoS). The results of this analysis show the evolution of the field, by highlighting the most notable authors, institutions, keywords, publications, countries, categories and journals.The research was funded by Programa Operativo FEDER Andalucía 2014‐2020, grant number “La reputación de las organizaciones en una sociedad digital. Elaboración de una Plataforma Inteligente para la Localización, Identificación y Clasificación de Influenciadores en los Medios Sociales Digitales (UMA18‐ FEDERJA‐148)” and The APC was funded by the same research gran

Eye-tracking the emergence of attentional anchors in a mathematics learning tablet activity

Little is known about micro-processes by which sensorimotor interaction gives rise to conceptual development. Per embodiment theory, these micro-processes are mediated by dynamical attentional structures. Accordingly this study investigated eye-gaze behaviors during engagement in solving tablet-based bimanual manipulation tasks designed to foster proportional reasoning. Seventy-six elementary- and vocational-school students (9-15 yo) participated in individual task-based clinical interviews. Data gathered included action-logging, eye-tracking, and videography. Analyses revealed the emergence of stable eye-path gaze patterns contemporaneous with first enactments of effective manipulation and prior to verbal articulations of manipulation strategies. Characteristic gaze patterns included consistent or recurring attention to screen locations that bore non-salient stimuli or no stimuli at all yet bore invariant geometric relations to dynamical salient features. Arguably, this research validates empirically hypothetical constructs from constructivism, particularly reflective abstraction

Why study movement variability in autism?

Autism has been defined as a disorder of social cognition, interaction and communication where ritualistic, repetitive behaviors are commonly observed. But how should we understand the behavioral and cognitive differences that have been the main focus of so much autism research? Can high-level cognitive processes and behaviors be identified as the core issues people with autism face, or do these characteristics perhaps often rather reflect individual attempts to cope with underlying physiological issues? Much research presented in this volume will point to the latter possibility, i.e. that people on the autism spectrum cope with issues at much lower physiological levels pertaining not only to Central Nervous Systems (CNS) function, but also to peripheral and autonomic systems (PNS, ANS) (Torres, Brincker, et al. 2013). The question that we pursue in this chapter is what might be fruitful ways of gaining objective measures of the large-scale systemic and heterogeneous effects of early atypical neurodevelopment; how to track their evolution over time and how to identify critical changes along the continuum of human development and aging. We suggest that the study of movement variability—very broadly conceived as including all minute fluctuations in bodily rhythms and their rates of change over time (coined micro-movements (Figure 1A-B) (Torres, Brincker, et al. 2013))—offers a uniquely valuable and entirely objectively quantifiable lens to better assess, understand and track not only autism but cognitive development and degeneration in general. This chapter presents the rationale firstly behind this focus on micro-movements and secondly behind the choice of specific kinds of data collection and statistical metrics as tools of analysis (Figure 1C). In brief the proposal is that the micro-movements (defined in Part I – Chapter 1), obtained using various time scales applied to different physiological data-types (Figure 1), contain information about layered influences and temporal adaptations, transformations and integrations across anatomically semi-independent subsystems that crosstalk and interact. Further, the notion of sensorimotor re-afference is used to highlight the fact that these layered micro-motions are sensed and that this sensory feedback plays a crucial role in the generation and control of movements in the first place. In other words, the measurements of various motoric and rhythmic variations provide an access point not only to the “motor systems”, but also access to much broader central and peripheral sensorimotor and regulatory systems. Lastly, we posit that this new lens can also be used to capture influences from systems of multiple entry points or collaborative control and regulation, such as those that emerge during dyadic social interactions

Designing Attentive Information Dashboards

Information dashboards are a critical capability in contemporary business intelligence and analytics systems. Despite their strong potential to support better decision-making, the massive amount of information they provide challenges users performing data exploration tasks. Accordingly, dashboard users face difficulties in managing their limited attentional resources when processing the presented information on dashboards. Also, studies have shown that the amount of concentrated time humans can spend on a task has dramatically decreased in recent years; thus, there is a need for designing user interfaces that support users attention management. In this design science research project, we propose attentive information dashboards that provide individualized visual attention feedback (VAF) as an innovative artifact to solve this problem. We articulate theoretically grounded design principles and instantiate a software artifact leveraging users eye movement data in real time to provide individualized VAF. We evaluated the instantiated artifact in a controlled lab experiment with 92 participants. The results from analyzing users eye movement after receiving individualized VAF reveal that our proposed design has a positive effect on users attentional resource allocation, attention shift rate, and attentional resource management. We contribute a system architecture for attentive information dashboards that support data exploration and two theoretically grounded design principles that provide prescriptive knowledge on how to provide individualized VAF. Practitioners can leverage the prescriptive knowledge derived from our research to design innovative systems that support users information processing by managing their limited attentional resources