Valentin takes us inside the lab room and introduces a brand-new study he is right now conducting together with Alina Krug and Dr. Marian Sauter at General Psychology, Ulm University.
Studying eye-gaze has long been employed as a central method for understanding attentional dynamics and cognitive processes in a variety of domains. Mobile eye-trackers promise new opportunities to extend this research into the wild, i.e., more real-life contexts. The affordable Pupil Neon, we are using here, does not even require calibration. But how good is it at detecting eye movements and pupil size?
In our study “Independent Comparative Evaluation of the Pupil Neon - A New Mobile Eye-tracker” we propose an independent evaluation of the Pupil Neon eye-tracker using an established test battery (Ehinger et al., 2019), comparing its performance with a gold-standard eye-tracker, the EyeLink 1000 Plus.
Tracked by both devices in parallel we are recording eye movements such as
- Fixations
- Saccades
- Smooth pursuits
- Micro saccades
- Blinks
- Pupil size
- During head movements (roll, tilt)
The parallel tracking brings its own challenges like synchronization issues and interference between the two trackers. Yet, the results on the strengths and weaknesses, as well as potential use cases of the Pupil Neon will be informative for subsequent eye-tracking research.
The pre-registered stage 1 manuscript (available here), received in-principal acceptance and we just have finished the process of data collection.
Stay tuned: the final report can be expected by spring next year!