Interactive Visualization for Understanding of Attention Patterns

Discovering users’ behavior via eye-tracking data analysis is a common task that has important implications in many domains including marketing, design, behavior study, and psychology. In our project, we are interested in analyzing eye-tracking data to investigate differences between age groups in emotion regulation using visual attention. To achieve this goal, we adopted a general-purposed interactive visualization method, namely Glyph, to conduct temporal analysis on participants’ fixation data. Glyph facilitates comparison of abstract data sequences to understand group and individual patterns. In this article, we show how a visualization system adopting the Glyph method can be constructed, allowing us to understand how users shift their fixations and dwelling given different stimuli, and how different user groups differ in terms of these temporal eye-tracking patterns. The discussion demonstrates the utility of Glyph not only for the purpose of our project, but also for other eye-tracking data analyses that require exploration within the space of temporal patterns.