Deducing self-interaction in eye movement data using sequential spatial point processes
Eye movement data are outputs of an analyser tracking the gaze when a person is inspecting a scene. These kind of data are of increasing importance in scientific research as well as in applications, e.g. in marketing and man-machine interface planning. Thus the new areas of application call for advanced analysis tools. Our research objective is to suggest statistical modelling of eye movement sequences using sequential spatial point processes, which decomposes the variation in data into structural components having interpretation. We consider three elements of an eye movement sequence: heterogeneity of the target space, contextuality between subsequent movements, and time-dependent behaviou…
Statistical inference for eye movement sequences using spatial and spatio-temporal point processes
Eye tracking is a widely used method for recording eye movements, which are important indicators of ongoing cognitive processes during the viewing of a target stimulus. Despite the variety of applications, the analyses of eye movement data have been lacking of methods that could take both the spatial and temporal information into account. So far, most of the analyses are based on strongly aggregated measures, because eye movement data are considered to be complex due to their richness and large variation between and within the individuals. Therefore, the eye movement methodology needs new statistical tools in order to take full advantage of the data. This dissertation is among the first stud…
What we look at in paintings: A comparison between experienced and inexperienced art viewers
How do people look at art? Are there any differences between how experienced and inexperienced art viewers look at a painting? We approach these questions by analyzing and modeling eye movement data from a cognitive art research experiment, where the eye movements of twenty test subjects, ten experienced and ten inexperienced art viewers, were recorded while they were looking at paintings. Eye movements consist of stops of the gaze as well as jumps between the stops. Hence, the observed gaze stop locations can be thought as a spatial point pattern, which can be modeled by a spatio-temporal point process. We introduce some statistical tools to analyze the spatio-temporal eye movement data, a…
Modeling Forest Tree Data Using Sequential Spatial Point Processes
AbstractThe spatial structure of a forest stand is typically modeled by spatial point process models. Motivated by aerial forest inventories and forest dynamics in general, we propose a sequential spatial approach for modeling forest data. Such an approach is better justified than a static point process model in describing the long-term dependence among the spatial location of trees in a forest and the locations of detected trees in aerial forest inventories. Tree size can be used as a surrogate for the unknown tree age when determining the order in which trees have emerged or are observed on an aerial image. Sequential spatial point processes differ from spatial point processes in that the…
Silent music reading: Amateur musicians' visual processing and descriptive skill
This article addresses the silent reading of music notation, combining eye-movement measures with a semantic analysis of readers’ verbal descriptions of the notated music. A group of musical novices ( n = 16) and two groups of musical amateurs (less experienced n = 11 and more experienced n = 10) participated in three separate measurement sessions during a nine-month-long university music course designed for future primary-school teachers. In each session they viewed a notated folk song for 30 s and then described what they had seen. Greater musical experience was found to be connected with shorter fixation durations, more linear scanning of the notated music, and more accurate and integra…
Reading ahead: Adult music students’ eye movements in temporally controlled performances of a children’s song
In the present study, education majors minoring in music education ( n = 24) and music performance majors ( n =14) read and performed the original version and melodically altered versions of a simple melody in a given tempo. Eye movements during music reading and piano performances were recorded. Errorless trials were analyzed to explore the adjustments of visual processing in successful performances. The temporal length of the eye–hand span (time between gaze and the performed note) was typically around one second or less. A measure of gaze activity indicated that performers generally inspected two quarter-note areas between two metrical beat onsets. The performance majors operated with s…