Eye Tracking for Dynamic, User-Driven Workflows

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are engaged in the empirical study of human-information interaction in high-consequence national security environments. This focus emerged from our longstanding interactions with military and civilian intelligence analysts working across a broad array of domains, from signals intelligence to cybersecurity to geospatial imagery analysis. In this paper, we discuss how several years’ of work with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery analysts revealed the limitations of eye tracking systems for capturing gaze events in the dynamic, user-driven problem-solving strategies characteristic of geospatial analytic workflows. We also explain the need for eye tracking systems capable of supporting inductive study of dynamic, user-driven problem-solving strategies characteristic of geospatial analytic workflows. We then discuss an ongoing project in which we are leveraging some of the unique properties of SAR image products to develop a prototype eyetracking data collection and analysis system that will support inductive studies of visual workflows in SAR image analysis environments.

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