A Real-Time Approach to Capture Ambient and Focal Attention in Visual Search
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
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.
Language: English
Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4410701959