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Eye Tracking Research Measures Your Problem Solving Skills

Eye Tracking Research Measures Your Problem Solving Skills An interesting study was done in collaboration with Stanford University and Columbia Teachers College focusing on the degree of pupil dilation in visual tasks and aural ones. Until now, pupil dilation has been shown to be a reliable way to measure cognitive load, but scientists at the institutions say the effect of aural versus visual task presentation on pupil dilation is still unknown, and so they set out to measure it.

Examining three tasks utilizing a range of cognitive activities, the researchers had participants do mental multiplication, digit sequence recall, and vigilance studies. Aural stimuli and visual stimuli were both used for controlling all known visual influences on pupil diameter.

What they found was that the patterns of dilation were similar for both aural and visual presentation on all three tasks, but that the levels of pupil response were greater for aural presentation. It is interesting because it shows the effect sound has on the human body and the cognitive process and, perhaps, the research demonstrates that cognitive load is lower for visual than aural presentation.

Since most interfaces are visual, and many require a participant to shift attention between a variety of tasks, assessing the cognitive load imposed by visual tasks is important when it comes to efficient visual interface design. The pupil can reveal a lot of information about the timing and magnitude of cognitive loads and has therefore been used to study such cognitive phenomena as perception, memory, reasoning, and attention. But historically speaking, much of the influential studies done on pupil dilation have been used in addition with auditory stimuli in order to avoid interference from pupillary light reflex.

But how much does aural information influence the studies? The researchers felt the lack of data muddles the use of dilations for comparing cognitive loads between visual and aural tasks as it can’t know how much of the difference is caused by aural stimuli rather than visual.

In the study, 24 Stanford undergrads were equipped with a Tobii remote eye tracker over the course of the 3 tasks (see the link below for details on each task and individual study), and the researchers found that auditory presentation led to larger pupil dilations, supporting their theory that aural stimuli has a great effect on cognitive perception. The difference in magnitude of the 2 conditions led them to believe that the resulting difference in cognitive load implied that visual task presentation led to a lower cognitive load than auditory presentation.

Effects of visual and verbal presentation on cognitive load in vigilance, memory and arithmetic tasks

Eye Tracking Research Measures Your Problem Solving Skills

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