The Use of Eye-Gaze to Understand Multimedia Learning

Background On Eye-Gaze Research

According to the eye-mind hypothesis (Just & Carpenter, 1980) and the assumption of the eye-mind link (Reichle, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2006), there is a close association between the element of the visual field a person is fixating on (aka overt attention) and his/her cognitive attention (aka covert attention). It is assumed that individuals are attending to the element of the visual field which their eyes are fixated (Anderson, 2000; Wang, 2011). When people attend to information they make a sequence of fixations separated by fast eye movements known as saccades. Fixations capture the motionless gaze or pauses that typically last about 200-500ms when visual information enters the information processing system; on the other hand, vision is suppressed during saccades (Rayner, 1998; Viviani, 1990). Therefore, information abstracted from learners’ fixations - including duration, frequency, location, or sequence - has been considered the most meaningful for understanding attentional processes during multimedia learning.