Journal of Eye Movement Research

Conventional eye trackers are difficult to deploy in fashion-runway settings because they require head stabilization, wearable devices, close-range cameras, or infrared illumination. This study develops a far-field, non-contact eye-tracking framework and prototype system for measuring target-directed visual attention in runway-viewing settings using standard cameras. The framework integrates eye-region normalization, 3D gaze estimation, individualized homography-based point-of-regard mapping onto a scene plane, adaptive filtering, DBSCAN-based outlier removal, and kernel density estimation. In Experiment 1, 16 participants completed a controlled calibration-grid benchmark with the proposed system and EyeLink 1000 Plus. Compared with the EyeLink 1000 Plus, the proposed system exhibited higher positional error ($A_{\mathrm{pos}}$: $2.50\pm 0.25°$ vs. $1.74\pm 0.55°$) and a higher value on the processed-output spatial-precision measure ($A_{\mathrm{spa}}$: $2.31\pm 0.24°$ vs. $1.02\pm 0.37°$). These results characterize end-to-end localization under the calibrated benchmark geometry and provide a controlled reference for the subsequent AOI-level evaluation. In Experiment 2, an independent sample of 16 participants completed an instructed right chest targeting task at 2 m, 4 m and 6 m. AOI-retained sample percentages were 80.4%, 97.3%, and 96.0%, respectively, and gaze-density maps concentrated within the predefined upper-body target region. These findings support the feasibility of target-directed AOI-level localization at far-field distances without chin-rest stabilization under the tested simulated runway-observation protocol.

Objective: This study employed eye-tracking and ERP to investigate structured pattern processing in basketball players of different skill levels. Methods: A skill-level comparison (skilled vs. less-skilled) was adopted. Participants viewed static point-light displays depicting basketball half-court configurations, with structured (typical tactical formations) and unstructured (random positions) conditions randomly presented. Participants predicted offensive actions while behavioral, eye-tracking, and ERP data were simultaneously recorded. Results: Skilled players showed higher decision accuracy than less-skilled players under structured conditions but not under unstructured conditions, whereas they responded significantly faster under both conditions, with a larger group difference under structured conditions. For pupil diameter, skilled players showed smaller pupil diameters than less-skilled players under both conditions, while within the skilled group pupil diameter was larger under structured than unstructured conditions. Eye-tracking revealed fewer total fixations and a distinct gaze distribution in skilled players—more fixations on opponents and the ball, fewer on open space—along with larger pupil diameters under structured conditions, suggesting enhanced cognitive engagement. ERP data showed that skilled players exhibited larger P300 and LNC amplitudes under structured conditions, reflecting enhanced semantic mapping and schema-based retrieval. Conclusions: These findings are consistent with a theoretical perspective in which expertise may involve a shift from “pattern recognition” toward “abstract representation,” rather than a reduction in neural activity. However, abstract representation, neural information density, and semantic encoding were not directly measured in the present study. The Transformer architecture is therefore offered as a conceptual analogy—its multi-head self-attention corresponds to skilled players’ hierarchical visual sampling, its encoder to semantic mapping (P300 enhancement), and its memory integration to schema-based retrieval (LNC enhancement). These findings provide a basis for structured situational training in sport decision-making.

Word decoding as a foundational reading skill is significantly associated with phonological awareness in children with typical development as well as children with intellectual disabilities. Phonological awareness is often assessed using traditional behavioral methods, which may underestimate abilities, particularly in individuals who are difficult to test due to behavioral, communication, or attentional difficulties. This study tested whether an eye-tracking “looking-while-listening” paradigm provides an additional recording option which is appropriate and potentially informative to examine the cognitive process while solving phonological awareness tasks in the assessment of children with intellectual disabilities. Fifty-nine children with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities (aged 8–14 years) completed sound, syllable, and phoneme blending and segmentation tasks in paper-based and eye-tracking formats. Participants were classified as proficient or non-proficient based on behavioral performance in the paper-based format. Eye-tracking indices included proportional fixation duration, counts, revisits, and duration of the initial fixation (first fixation) on target, phonologically similar, and distractor images. Proficient participants showed a higher proportional total fixation duration and a higher frequency of fixation on target images, as well as greater attention to phonologically similar competitors than distractors, compared to non-proficient participants, who showed no such differentiation. The findings which we obtained in our exploratory study suggest that eye tracking is a feasible, process-oriented method for assessing phonological awareness in children with intellectual disabilities and may capture cognitive mechanisms not reflected in traditional assessment procedures. This assumption should be pursued further through carefully designed experimental studies.