Smooth-pursuit performance during eye-typing from memory indicates mental fatigue

Mental fatigue is known to occur as a result of activities related to e.g. transportation, health-care and military operations. Gaze tracking has wide-ranging applications, with the technology becoming more compact and processing power reducing. Though numerous techniques have been applied to measu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tanya Bafna-Rührer, Per Bækgaard, John Paulin Hansen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2022-10-01
Series:Journal of Eye Movement Research
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Online Access:https://bop.unibe.ch/JEMR/article/view/8203
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Summary:Mental fatigue is known to occur as a result of activities related to e.g. transportation, health-care and military operations. Gaze tracking has wide-ranging applications, with the technology becoming more compact and processing power reducing. Though numerous techniques have been applied to measure mental fatigue using gaze tracking, smooth-pursuit movement, a natural eye movement generated when following a moving object with gaze, has not been explored with relation to mental fatigue. In this paper, we report the results from a smooth-pursuit movement based eye-typing experiment with varying task difficulty to generate cognitive load, performed in the morning and afternoon by 36 participants. We have investigated the effects of time-on-task and time of day on mental fatigue using self-reported questionnaires and smooth-pursuit performance, extracted from the gaze data. The self-reported mental fatigue increased due to time-on-task, but the time of day did not have an effect. The results illustrate that smooth-pursuit movement performance declined with time-on-task, with increased error in the gaze position and an inability to match the speed of the moving object. The findings exhibit the feasibility of mental fatigue detection using smooth-pursuit movements during an eye-interactive task of eye-typing.
ISSN:1995-8692