Slim Mieke Sarah, Kandel Margaret, Yacovone Anthony, Snedeker Jesse
Language Development Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Open Mind (Camb). 2024 Nov 22;8:1369-1424. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00171. eCollection 2024.
There is a growing interest in the use of webcams to conduct eye-tracking experiments over the internet. We assessed the performance of two webcam-based eye-tracking techniques for behavioral research: manual annotation of webcam videos () and the automated WebGazer eye-tracking algorithm. We compared these methods to a traditional infrared eye-tracker and assessed their performance in both lab and web-based settings. In both lab and web experiments, participants completed the same battery of five tasks, selected to trigger effects of various sizes: two visual fixation tasks and three visual world tasks testing real-time (psycholinguistic) processing effects. In the lab experiment, we simultaneously collected infrared eye-tracking, manual eye-tracking, and WebGazer data; in the web experiment, we simultaneously collected manual eye-tracking and WebGazer data. We found that the two webcam-based methods are suited to capture different types of eye-movement patterns. Manual eye-tracking, similar to infrared eye-tracking, detected both large and small effects. WebGazer, however, showed less accuracy in detecting short, subtle effects. There was no notable effect of setting for either method. We discuss the trade-offs researchers face when choosing eye-tracking methods and offer advice for conducting eye-tracking experiments over the internet.
使用网络摄像头在互联网上进行眼动追踪实验的兴趣日益浓厚。我们评估了两种基于网络摄像头的眼动追踪技术在行为研究中的性能：对网络摄像头视频进行手动标注（）以及自动化的WebGazer眼动追踪算法。我们将这些方法与传统的红外眼动仪进行比较，并评估它们在实验室和基于网络的环境中的性能。在实验室和网络实验中，参与者都完成了相同的一组五项任务，这些任务旨在引发各种大小的效应：两项视觉注视任务和三项视觉世界任务，用于测试实时（心理语言学）处理效应。在实验室实验中，我们同时收集了红外眼动追踪、手动眼动追踪和WebGazer数据；在网络实验中，我们同时收集了手动眼动追踪和WebGazer数据。我们发现，这两种基于网络摄像头的方法适用于捕捉不同类型的眼动模式。与红外眼动追踪类似，手动眼动追踪能够检测到大小效应。然而，WebGazer在检测短暂、细微的效应时准确性较低。两种方法在不同环境下均未表现出显著差异。我们讨论了研究人员在选择眼动追踪方法时面临的权衡，并为在互联网上进行眼动追踪实验提供了建议。
