Synchronized eye movements during video

In a study published in PNAS we show how eye movements can be used to measure the level of attention of students in online education:

Below we see the gaze position of 27 students as red dots while watching educational videos. In the attentive condition students watch the video normally. In the distracted condition, students are asked to also do a mental arithmetic task, which keeps them distracted. Notice that gaze position are tighly clustered when attending, and spead all over the place when distracted.

We can also look in to depth when students are paying attention in the video. Below we added traces on the bottom which indicate how synchronized eye movements and pupil size are between students at that point in time. When this inter-subject correlation (ISC) is above the pink-shaded area the synchronization is statistically significant.

We used web cameras to capture eye movements and we used Elicit to carry out the experiment. Read more about the platform and try some experiments out here or find the code on GitHub.