Assessing media relevance via eye tracking

To ease the problem of data overloading, it is crucial to understand the user behavior when s/he interacts with online contents, or more specifically, a web page containing several entries for further exploration. We devise to estimate the relevance of an entry to the user goal by observing eye movements as implicit feedback. Specifically, this study proposes a framework that assumes eye movement measures can be used to infer a user's cognition. A rating task was conducted in which subjects were required to judge whether an image was relevant to a word. Results showed that the total fixation duration and the fixation count can be used to discriminate between the relevant and irrelevant conditions; in contrast, the first fixation duration cannot. In addition, the subjective rating and relevancy manipulation interacted on the total fixation duration. Converging evidence verifies the assumption we have proposed.