How to Measure Attention

This chapter summarizes the main direct and indirect objective ways to measure attention at a macroscale. We focus on quantitative techniques that provide fine-grain spatial and temporal information about attentive responses. The attentive response can be either measured directly in the brain or indirectly through participants’ behavior. Only one of the techniques that are described here is based on participant active feedback: mouse tracking. This is because the mouse-tracking feedback is very close to the one of the eye tracking, and this is an emerging approach of interest for the future: it requires less time and less money and provides more data than classical eye tracking.

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