Eye Tracking Research 2: An Alternative Way to Study Eye Gaze
The conventional eye tracking method is costly and very hard to administer remotely. With this approach, it costs almost nothing and it's really easy to collect data remotely. I find this method quite effective and more accurate than the conventional eye tracking method in studying reading habits of people such as reading paths and fixation time on particular words and phrases (i.e., Which words or phrases are they actually reading at given moments?). I intend to collect data by using this method to answer the below question:
- Do L1 English speakers and Japanese ELLs follow the same reading paths when they read English texts?
How to Set It Up
This setup consists of two main tools: (1) a web page with the flashlight effect (as seen below) and (2) a mouse cursor tracking and analysis tool such as Navilytics, ABTO Analytics, and hotjar.
Flashlight Effect
The concept was originally developed and implemented by Ryan O. Murphy and Michael Schulte. According them:
This tool mimics eye-tracking but does so without special equipment. Flashlight offers a cost effective and rapid means of collecting data on how long, how often, and in what order a participant attends to different parts of visual stimuli.
To implement it in your web page, you need to use both jQuery (JavaScript library) API and CSS. To make this process much simpler and easier, I used the website called CodePen, which is a web-based programming platform. I didn't actually have to write the codes from scratch as someone had already written them and shared them on the website. The end result is shown below. (Here's a slightly different implementation of the technique.)
See the Pen Attempting to make a Blur Hover by KOICHI SATO (@HADOMAN) on CodePen.
If you have tried it above, you can probably understand that the movements and paths of the mouse cursor should closely match your attentional paths while you read. And the mouse cursor tracking tools such as Navilytics, ABTO Analytics, and hotjar can keep track of all the mouse cursor movement data online.
Mouse Cursor Tracking Tools
All these three tracking and analysis tools (Navilytics, ABTO Analytics, and hotjar) are open source and free for anyone to use. All I need to do is to insert a block of code in a web page, and any one of the three will tack the participant's mouse cursor moves on the web page.
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