Eye tracking and visualization. Introduction to the Special Thematic Issue

Abstract

There is a growing interest in eye tracking technologies applied to support traditional visualization techniques like diagrams, charts, maps, or plots, either static, animated, or interactive ones. More complex data analyses are required to derive knowledge and meaning from the data. Eye tracking systems serve that purpose in combination with biological and computer vision, cognition, perception, visualization, human-computer-interaction, as well as usability and user experience research. The 10 articles collected in this thematic special issue provide interesting examples how sophisticated methods of data analysis and representation enable researchers to discover and describe fundamental spatio-temporal regularities in the data. The human visual system, supported by appropriate visualization tools, enables the human operator to solve complex tasks, like understanding and interpreting three-dimensional medical images, controlling air traffic by radar displays, supporting instrument flight tasks, or interacting with virtual realities. The development and application of new visualization techniques is of major importance for future technological progress.

The mechanism of word satiation in Tibetan reading: Evidence from eye movements

“…By comparison, eye-tracking technology belongs to online (or real-time) measures (Rayner, 2009). Hence, not only can it control irrelevant variables such as distraction, but also probe the underlying language cognitive processing during reading (Burch et al, 2017;Carrol & Conklin, 2015;Fan & Reilly, 2020;Gidlöf et al, 2013;Pannasch et al, 2008). Furthermore, since word satiation is based on the perception of the word (Tong & Yan, 2013) and primarily relies on visual channels (Han, 2000), this technology is the most effective in investigating visual information processing (Xu & Wang, 2020).…”

VisME: Visual microsaccades explorer

“…With visualization alone, it might be difficult to handle all of the data and to fully understand it. Visual analytics can be an invaluable tool in allowing researchers to understand and compare complex data sets (Burch et al, 2018). According to Thomas and Cook (2005), "visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces."…”