Analysing the spatial dimension of eye movement data using a visual analytic approach

Conventional analyses on eye movement data only take into account eye movement metrics, such as the number or the duration of fixations and length of the scanpaths, on which statistical analysis is performed for detecting significant differences. However, the spatial dimension in the eye movements is neglected, which is an essential element when investigating the design of maps. The study described in this paper uses a visual analytics software package, the Visual Analytics Toolkit, to analyze the eye movement data. Selection, simplification and aggregation functions are applied to filter out meaningful subsets of the data to be able to recognize structures in the movement data. Visualising and analysing these patterns provides essential insights in the user’s search strategies while working on a(n interactive) map.