When it was first introduced, eye trackers were expensive and difficult to use. In recent years, though, they have become more affordable and less intrusive. Eye tracking refers to the recording and analysis of eye gaze in order to gain insight about a participant’s focus of attention. Researchers have used eye tracking in a variety of contexts—marketing, design, tourism, psychology, and others. In this talk, I will introduce some of the basics of eye tracking data collection and analysis, including fundamental eye tracking metrics. I will also discuss how we use eye tracking to study differences in reading and tracing strategies used by programmers while debugging. The process involves the use of a number of advanced algorithms including cross-reference quantification analysis and scanpath trend analysis.

Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo is a full professor of the Ateneo de Manila University. She teaches at the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science and heads the Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences (ALLS). Her areas of specialization are educational technology, intelligent tutoring systems, and affective computing. She established ALLS in 2011 through a grant from the Department of Science and Technology’s Engineering Research and Development for Technology program. ALLS currently has two project funded by the Commission on Higher Education—one on the development of augmented reality games and applications and another to develop software that helps with reading comprehension.