EALab (Eye Activity Lab): a MATLAB Toolbox for Variable Extraction, Multivariate Analysis and Classification of Eye-Movement Data

Recent advances in the reliability of the eye-tracking methodology as well as the increasing availability of affordable non-intrusive technology have opened the door to new research opportunities in a variety of areas and applications. This has raised increasing interest within disciplines such as medicine, business and education for analysing human perceptual and psychological processes based on eye-tracking data. However, most of the currently available software requires programming skills and focuses on the analysis of a limited set of eye-movement measures (e.g., saccades and fixations), thus excluding other measures of interest to the classification of a determined state or condition. This paper describes ‘EALab’, a MATLAB toolbox aimed at easing the extraction, multivariate analysis and classification stages of eye-activity data collected from commercial and independent eye trackers. The processing implemented in this toolbox enables to evaluate variables extracted from a wide range of measures including saccades, fixations, blinks, pupil diameter and glissades. Using EALab does not require any programming and the analysis can be performed through a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) consisting of three processing modules: 1) eye-activity measure extraction interface, 2) variable selection and analysis interface, and 3) classification interface.

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