What Does The Eye Best Tell? An Investigation of Eye Activity for Emotion, Cognitive load and Task Transition Recognition

Eye activity has previously been found to be relevant to emotion, cognitive load and task transition, but studies have mainly focused on one of them and used a single type of task. This motivates an investigation of eye activity for emotion, cognitive load and task transition recognition in a single study with the goal of understanding the capability of eye activity. We recorded 15 participants’ eye data while they completed a sequence of free-viewing emotional image tasks and a sequence of arithmetic tasks. Eye activity features within fixed analysis windows were extracted to classify (i) between four levels of arousal, (ii) three levels of valence, (iii) between three levels of cognitive load, (iv) between affective and cognitive tasks, and (v) between task transition and non-transition. The results suggest that eye activity can best be used for task transition recognition, with an accuracy of 77%, followed by cognitive load level recognition, then affective and cognitive task recognition. Implications of this finding include automatically segmenting long and continuous signals into task units with eye activity before analyzing human behavior.