Adapting the presentation of learning material to the specific student?s
characteristics is useful to improve the overall learning experience and
learning styles can play an important role to this purpose. In this paper,
we investigate the possibility to distinguish between Visual and Verbal
learning styles from gaze data. In an experiment involving first year
students of an engineering faculty, content regarding the basics of
programming was presented in both text and graphic form, and participants?
gaze data was recorded by means of an eye tracker. Three metrics were
selected to characterize the user?s gaze behavior, namely, percentage of
fixation duration, percentage of fixations, and average fixation duration.
Percentages were calculated on ten intervals into which each participant?s
interaction time was subdivided, and this allowed us to perform timebased
assessments. The obtained results showed a significant relation between gaze
data and Visual/Verbal learning styles for an information arrangement where
the same concept is presented in graphical format on the left and in text
format on the right. We think that this study can provide a useful
contribution to learning styles research carried out exploiting eye tracking
technology, as it is characterized by unique traits that cannot be found in
similar investigations.