Document Type
Conference Paper
Publication Date
2025
DOI
10.1145/3715669.3723111
Publication Title
ETRA '25: Proceedings of the 2025 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications
Pages
4 (1-7)
Conference Name
ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, 26-29 May 2025, Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
During visual search, individuals’ attention shifts between ambient and focal states in response to task demands and stimuli. The ambient/focal coefficient K is a statistically validated measure of these states, computed offline from fixation duration and saccade amplitude data. While current methods compute K offline, real-time computation could enable applications such as monitoring user attention, creating attention-adaptive user interfaces, and optimizing graphics rendering. However, real-time computation of K requires stable estimates for the parameters of fixation duration and saccade amplitude distributions. Since these distributions are heavy-tailed, the real-time estimates exhibit high variance and slow convergence. To overcome this, we propose a robust parametrization and an alternative estimation method, along with two real-time measures analogous to K. Through a map viewing study involving localization and route planning tasks, we show that our proposed measures exhibit dynamics consistent with offline K.
Rights
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/authors.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
Original Publication Citation
Jayawardena, G., Jayawardana, Y., Abeysinghe, Y., Mahanama, B., Jayarathna, S., & Gwizdka, J. (2025). A real-time approach to capture ambient and focal attention in visual search. In Yusuke Sugano, Mohamed Khamis, Aladine Chetouani, Ludwig Sidenmark, & Alessandro Bruno (Eds.), ETRA '25: Proceedings of the 2025 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (4). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715669.3723111
Repository Citation
Jayawardena, G., Jayawardana, Y., Abeysinghe, Y., Mahanama, B., Jayarathna, S., & Gwizdka, J. (2025). A real-time approach to capture ambient and focal attention in visual search. In Yusuke Sugano, Mohamed Khamis, Aladine Chetouani, Ludwig Sidenmark, & Alessandro Bruno (Eds.), ETRA '25: Proceedings of the 2025 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (4). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715669.3723111
ORCID
0000-0002-5114-9732 (Abeysinghe), 0000-0001-7773-7471 (Mahanama), 0000-0002-4879-7309 (Jayarathna)