Effects of sharing text selections on gaze cross-recurrence and interaction quality in a pair programming task

We present a dual eye-tracking study that demonstrates the effect of sharing selection among collaborators in a remote pair-programming scenario. Forty pairs of engineering students completed several program understanding tasks while their gaze was synchronously recorded. The coupling of the programmers' focus of attention was measured by a cross-recurrence analysis of gaze that captures how much programmers look at the same sequence of spots within a short time span. A high level of gaze cross-recurrence is typical for pairs who actively engage in grounding efforts to build and maintain shared understanding. As part of their grounding efforts, programmers may use text selection to perform collaborative references. Broadcast selections serve as indexing sites for the selector as they attract non-selector's gaze shortly after they become visible. Gaze cross-recurrence is highest when selectors accompany their selections with speech to produce a multimodal reference.

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