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The following research paradigms are commonly used for eye tracking research. Each paradigm includes a brief description, followed by a list of references that include more detailed information.
Example builds of several of the following paradigms can be found in one of two locations. Experiment Builder contains a number of built-in paradigm examples. These examples can be found by opening Experiment Builder, clicking on File >> Examples. For more information on these builds, go to Help >> Contents >> Index (scroll down to Examples and select desired example) >> Display. The second location that may have example builds is on the SR Research Forum titled "Experiment Builder Examples Table of Contents" (linked below). On this page you will be able to find links to a number of different forums on specific topics and paradigms that are incredibly useful when building your own experiments.
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To see a few example experimental builds, visit our Demo Experimental Builds page. Each demo experiment lists a couple features that may be useful when programming your own experiments.
Visual Search
This is one of the best established research paradigms. This task involves visual scanning to find a target among many distractors. The basic idea is that there will be a linear increase in reaction time based on set size (i.e. the number of distractors). However, this relationship does not hold true for all sets of stimuli. Some targets retain low reaction times regardless of the number of distractors. These differences in the relationship between reaction time and set size reflect two different types of processing: serial and parallel.
More information:
Wolfe (1998a)
Scene Perception
This line of research examines how we look at various scenes, generally displayed on a computer monitor. The common research question addressed using this paradigm is the relationship between bottom-up and top-down factors that determine gaze location and duration. Bottom-up factors include luminance, color, and contrast and top-down factors include individual goals. As a result, many models of overt attention have been proposed. This research generally relies on interest area analysis to test the models.
More information:
Wang, Tian & Shen (2009)
Moving Window Paradigm
Initially designed by McConkie and Rayner (1975) to study how much information readers use from parafoveal and peripheral vision, this paradigm presents participants with a passage, but they are only able to view a small window of the passage so that only a certain number of characters are visible at one time. The window moves with the participant's gaze as they read the passage. In the initial study, the amount of characters available to the participant was manipulated, and the remaining characters were changed depending on the condition. This allowed the researchers to see how small it was possible to make the window without impairing reading ability. Since then, this gaze contingent window has moved into other areas of research.
More information:
McConkie and Rayner (1975)
Flash-Preview Moving-Window Paradigm
The flash-preview moving-window paradigm was adapted from the moving window paradigm to investigate the effect of a quick preview of a scene on visual search. A participant is briefly presented with the visual search scene (generally for about 250 ms), and then the screen is masked and the participant is given a target that they must search for. The scene is presented once more, except the participant is only able to view the scene through a small moving, gaze-contingent window. The time it takes the participant to find the search target is measured.
More information:
Castelhano and Henderson (2007)
The Visual World Paradigm
In the visual world paradigm, eye-tracking is used to investigate our complex decision making processes. Participants are shown 4 images on a screen; 1 image is the target image and the other 3 are distractor images. Participants need to click on the target image (for instance, a picture of grapes). The distractor images include a phonological competitor (“grave”; because this sounds similar to “grape”), a semantic competitor (“apple”; because the meaning of this word is related to the meaning of “grape”), and an unrelated distractor (shoe). Using the eye-tracker, we then measure where the participant looks and how long the participant looks at each of these images before correctly clicking on the target word/picture. By using heat maps, we can understand how competitors disrupt our decision making processes. Heat maps reflect how long an individual looks at a particular area, with hotter colors indicating longer viewing times.
More information:
Berends, Brouwer & Sprenger (2015)
Anti-Saccadic Paradigm
In this paradigm, an exogenous attention cue (a dot) is presented to subjects. Subjects are required to inhibit the natural tendency to make a saccade towards the dot and instead make a saccade in the opposite direction (an anti-saccade). Often, researchers using anti-saccades will also include pro-saccades (i.e. making a saccade towards the target) and require participants to switch between the tasks.
More information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisaccade_task
The Gap Task
The gap task is a paradigm that can be used to measure the "gap effect," first described by Saslow (1967). Generally, when a subject is presented with a fixation point and then immediately presented with a second fixation point (either to the left or the right of the first fixation point), there is a latency of about 200 ms. However, when there is a gap of at least 200 ms between the termination of the first fixation point and then presentation of the second fixation point, the latency decreases to about 150 ms. This is known as the "gap effect."
More information:
Saslow (1967)
The Remote Distractor Effect
In this paradigm, the subject fixates on an initial target and is told that a second target (known as a saccadic target) will appear in a particular direction. When the saccadic target appears, the subject is instructed to look towards the target. However, a remote visual distractor is also presented at the same time as the saccadic target, and research has found that the presentation of this distractor increases saccadic latency (or the time it takes for the subject to look at the saccadic target)
More information:
Levy-Schoen (1969)
Walker, Deubel, Schneider & Findlay (1997)
The Dot-Probe Task
The dot-probe task is a paradigm that can be used to measure selective attention, particularly vigilance to threat. In this paradigm, a participant is asked to focus on a fixation cross. Then, two stimuli are simultaneously presented on either side of the screen, generally for about 500 ms. One of these stimuli is neutral while the other is threatening. The stimuli are then removed and a dot is presented in the location of one of the former stimuli. The participant is instructed to indicate (using either a keyboard or a button box) which side of the screen the dot appeared, and latency is measured. It is thought that a faster reaction time when the dot is presented in the same location as the threatening stimulus indicates vigilance to threat. (Source: Wikipedia)
More information:
MacLeod, Mathews & Tata (1986)
The Smooth Pursuit Paradigm
Eye tracking can also be used as a diagnostic tool for brain injuries. In one test, participants (both with and without brain injury) are asked to follow a dot as it moves in a smooth oval around the screen (much like when your doctor asks you to follow their finger back and forth). The eye tracker measures the participants’ eye movements as they track the dot. In the two images below, you can see what a normal participant’s eye movement looks like while tracking the dot, demonstrating the “smooth pursuit” characteristic, (left image) and what the eye movement of a participant with brain damage looks like while tracking the dot (on the right).
Attentional Biases
As you’re most likely aware of, people enjoy looking at some images more than others and will actively avoid looking at certain images. Furthermore, certain situations draw the attention of particular individuals but not others. Eye tracking can help us to find these correlations and test our hypotheses. For instance, body dissatisfaction is associated with gaze avoidance (i.e. not looking at) of relevant body parts. Similarly, children who are exposed to parental conflict develop a particular vigilance (i.e. they spend more time looking at) for negative emotional stimuli. This phenomenon is referred to as an attentional bias: when individuals demonstrate tendencies to actively look at or avoid looking at particular stimuli.
In one experiment, Rachel Lucas-Thompson (2014) tested teenagers’ attentional biases toward negative emotions as a function of their exposure to marital conflict. Exposure to marital conflict (the IV) was measured and teenagers were showed a series of faces and asked to watch the faces as though they were watching TV. Lucas-Thompson predicted that higher parental conflict would be associated with an attentional bias (in this case vigilance) toward negative emotions. By using heat mapping, we can see that participants who were exposed to less marital conflict (left image) spent more time looking at positive emotional stimuli, whereas participants who were exposed to more marital conflict (right image) spent more time looking at negative emotional stimuli.
More information:
Lucas-Thompson (2014)
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