Gaze–mouse coordinated movements and dependency with coordination demands in tracing

Abstract

Eye movements have been shown to lead hand movements in tracing tasks where subjects have to move their fingers along a predefined trace. The question remained, whether the leading relationship was similar when tracing with a pointing device, such as a mouse; more importantly, whether tasks that required more or less gaze-mouse coordination would introduce variation in this pattern of behaviour, in terms of both spatial and temporal leading of gaze position to mouse movement. A three-level gaze-mouse coordination demand paradigm was developed to address these questions. A substantial data set of 1350 trials was collected and analysed. The linear correlation of gaze-mouse movements, the statistical distribution of the lead time, as well as the lead distance between gaze and mouse cursor positions were all considered, and we proposed a new method to quantify lead time in gaze-mouse coordination. The results supported and extended previous empirical findings that gaze often led mouse movements. We found that the gaze-mouse coordination demands of the task were positively correlated to the gaze lead, both spatially and temporally. However, the mouse movements were synchronised with or led gaze in the simple straight line condition, which demanded the least gaze-mouse coordination.

A novel process-based approach to improve resilience: Effects of computerized mouse-based (gaze)contingent attention training (MCAT) on reappraisal and rumination

“…Gaze-contingent attention feedback was provided, as similar as in the original ECAT paradigm, but based on the times that the mouse remained over the critical positive and negative words, while using a mouse-based moving window paradigm to uncover and process the relevant emotional material. This procedure was developed based on studies reporting a high degree of coordination between gaze and mouse movements in context of physical pointing computer tasks (e.g., Deng et al, 2016;Helsen, Elliott, Starkes, & Ricker, 1998). The effectiveness of the MCAT variant was then determined by: 1) the degree of coordination between gaze and mouse position measures for the time spent over critical positive vs. negative words during the training, and 2) the similarity of its effects with the original ECAT effects (Sanchez-Lopez, Everaert et al, 2018) in increasing attention regulation across the training and transferring to proximal processes of stress (dys)regulation (i.e., attentional disengagement, reappraisal and state rumination).…”

“…Contingent feedback to implement attention regulation is provided via mouse cursor coordination (i.e., participants move the mouse cursor to uncover words, while performing the training, and mouse pointer location coordinates are used to monitor and provide feedback on stimuli processing; see Methods section). This design was implemented following previous literature supporting a high degree of linkage between mouse cursor movements and actual eye gaze movements under conditions that facilitate mouse/gaze attention coupling (see, for instance, Deng, Chang, Kirkby, & Zhang, 2016;Liebling & Dumais, 2014). Eye-tracking was used in parallel, allowing us to first establish the level of gaze/mouse coordination during the performance of the MCAT variant (i.e., whether the mouse-cursor based method is precise enough to assess and intervene on attention mechanisms).…”

Tutorial mismatches: understanding the frictions due to interface differences when following software video tutorials

“…We also conducted a video analysis from our screen recordings, and illustrate some of our observations with participant's verbatim to clarify their thinking. As mouse pointer coordination with gaze lead has been largely depicted in the literature [8,19,33,58,61,74,80], we considered both gaze and mouse movements in our analysis related to reaching a target and locating user's attention. We structured our results by themes presented in our research questions to triangulate our findings and conclusions.…”

Dynamics of eye-hand coordination are flexibly preserved in eye-cursor coordination during an online, digital, object interaction task

“…Nonetheless, patterns of eye leading hand (or computer cursor or manipulandum) are remarkably consistent in the digital domain. In tracing shapes with a cursor, the eye leads the cursor by 223-295 ms [9], and in distractorless visual search there is a 190 ms lead [2]. A related paradigm of tracking an unpredictable object on a screen shows that the eye lags behind the target object by 24 ms, whereas the hand lags behind it by 108 ms [7].…”