University of Bristol, Bristol, England.
Behav Res Methods. 2010 Aug;42(3):692-700. doi: 10.3758/BRM.42.3.692.
We present a novel approach to comparing saccadic eye movement sequences based on the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm used in bioinformatics to compare DNA sequences. In the proposed method, the saccade sequence is spatially and temporally binned and then recoded to create a sequence of letters that retains fixation location, time, and order information. The comparison of two letter sequences is made by maximizing the similarity score computed from a substitution matrix that provides the score for all letter pair substitutions and a penalty gap. The substitution matrix provides a meaningful link between each location coded by the individual letters. This link could be distance but could also encode any useful dimension, including perceptual or semantic space. We show, by using synthetic and behavioral data, the benefits of this method over existing methods. The ScanMatch toolbox for MATLAB is freely available online (www.scanmatch.co.uk).
我们提出了一种新的比较扫视眼动序列的方法，该方法基于生物信息学中用于比较 DNA 序列的 Needleman-Wunsch 算法。在提出的方法中，扫视序列在空间和时间上进行分箱，然后重新编码为创建保留固定位置、时间和顺序信息的字母序列。通过最大化从替换矩阵计算的相似性得分来比较两个字母序列，该替换矩阵为所有字母对替换提供得分和罚分间隙。替换矩阵为每个由单个字母编码的位置提供了有意义的联系。这种联系可以是距离，但也可以编码任何有用的维度，包括感知或语义空间。我们通过使用合成和行为数据，展示了该方法相对于现有方法的优势。用于 MATLAB 的 ScanMatch 工具箱可在线免费获得（www.scanmatch.co.uk）。
