Search Results (272)

Background/Objectives: Cochlear implantation (CI) effectively treats severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss, but its vestibular effects remain under investigation. This retrospective study assessed perioperative changes in horizontal canal function (video head impulse test, vHIT) and graviceptive perception (subjective visual vertical, SVV). Methods: Forty-three adults (mean age: 59 ± 15 years) implanted between May 2017 and July 2018 were assessed pre- and postoperatively. The prespecified primary analysis was the paired comparison of vHIT gain at 60 ms in the implanted ear, performed separately by implantation side; all other comparisons were exploratory. Results: Paired vHIT data were available for 36 of 43 participants. Gain in the implanted ear did not change after right-sided CI (n = 17; 1.52 ± 0.37 to 1.59 ± 0.63; change: +0.07, 95% CI: −0.41 to 0.56; t(16) = 0.32, p = 0.754), whereas it fell after left-sided CI (n = 19; median: 1.41 to 1.07; z = −3.02, p = 0.003); the two sides were not compared formally. Implanted and non-implanted ears did not differ postoperatively (n = 37; p = 0.116). Fourteen of thirty-six participants (38.9%) developed new ipsilateral catch-up saccades (exact McNemar p = 0.031 and 0.039). SVV deviation was 0.77 ± 0.47° and 0.92 ± 0.51° (p = 0.086). Conclusions: No significant change was detected after right-sided CI or in SVV; given the wide confidence interval and the small sample, this is not evidence of preserved function. The left-sided reduction, the newly developed ipsilateral catch-up saccades and the exploratory findings require confirmation in larger prospective studies. Full article

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is associated with visual, cognitive, and oculomotor alterations that may impair reading, highlighting the potential of eye tracking to objectively characterise these changes during a task. An observational study included 46 patients with PD, classified according to the Hoehn and Yahr (HY) scale, and 56 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. All participants underwent a comprehensive optometric examination and performed the Radner–Vissum reading test at 50 cm, while eye movements were recorded using a portable eye tracker. Fixation, saccadic, pupil diameter, and reading performance variables were analysed. PD patients showed a progressive reduction in pupil diameter (p = 0.001) and saccadic alterations, with reduced amplitude and velocity at the initial visual acuity levels (p < 0.001), whereas fixation parameters did not differ significantly between groups (p > 0.05). They also showed longer reading times, greater total reading time (84.33 ± 30.39 s vs. 37.50 ± 7.23 s; p < 0.001), lower overall scores (p < 0.001), and more reading errors (p < 0.001), whereas the logarithmic reading acuity determination (logRAD) values were comparable (p = 0.905). Overall, PD was associated with impaired reading performance and oculomotor and autonomic nervous system changes objectively measured by eye tracking during functional reading. Full article

To compare oculomotor profiles among children wearing orthokeratology, defocus spectacle, and diffusion optics technology lenses in a routine pediatric myopia management setting. This real-world observational study included children who had worn one of the three lens types for approximately one year and had available eye tracking data. Lens type was selected during routine clinical care rather than assigned by the investigators. Oculomotor parameters were compared among lens groups using Kruskal–Wallis tests with false discovery rate correction. One-year spherical equivalent change was examined only in the defocus spectacle and diffusion optics technology groups. Adjusted and exploratory analyses included age, sex, baseline spherical equivalent, baseline axial length, axial elongation, and parental education categories. A total of 134 children were analyzed, including 46 in the orthokeratology group, 49 in the defocus spectacle group, and 39 in the diffusion optics technology group. Significant group differences were observed for microsaccade frequency (FDR adjusted p = 0.00099), peak velocity (FDR adjusted p = 0.00099), latency (FDR adjusted p = 0.00395), fixation disparity (FDR adjusted p = 0.00395), and conjugacy (FDR adjusted p = 0.0274). Saccade frequency and saccade amplitude did not differ significantly. One-year spherical equivalent change did not differ significantly between the defocus spectacle group and the diffusion optics technology group (−0.27 ± 0.43 D vs. −0.34 ± 0.36 D, p = 0.312). No statistically significant correlation was observed between spherical equivalent change and microsaccade frequency in the two spectacle lens groups (Spearman r = −0.231, p = 0.069). Parental education categories showed no consistent association with oculomotor parameters after correction for multiple comparisons. Children wearing different myopia control lenses showed selective differences in oculomotor profiles. Refractive change in the two spectacle lens groups was similar, and the observed oculomotor differences should not be interpreted as direct indicators of myopia control efficacy. Eye tracking may provide complementary information about visual behavior and lens adaptation, but prospective studies with age-balanced designs and longitudinal refractive and axial length outcomes are needed. Full article

Donepezil, a cholinesterase inhibitor widely used in dementia, can be associated with saccadic oscillations (SO), but their time course and clinical relevance are unclear. In this prospective observational study, 18 patients with dementia underwent video-oculography at baseline (V0), one month (V1), and three months (V2) after initiation or dose escalation of donepezil. SO were counted over a single 30 s recording during visual fixation and in darkness, expressed as events/30 s. Dizziness was assessed with the Dizziness Handicap Inventory (DHI) and the Vestibular Disorders Activities of Daily Living (VADL) scale. Timepoints were compared using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, and within-patient associations by repeated-measures correlation (rmcorr). SO with fixation increased from a median of 0.0 (interquartile range 0.0–1.0) events/30 s at V0 to 13.5 (7.2–15.8) at V1 (unadjusted p = 0.008, adjusted p = 0.023), then declined, but the difference from baseline lost statistical significance after multiple-comparison adjustment at V2 (6.5 [0.0–11.5]; unadjusted p = 0.031, adjusted p = 0.063). SO without fixation did not change (all p > 0.12). On rmcorr, SO without fixation was associated with the VADL (r = 0.59, p = 0.005) but neither measure was associated with the DHI. A transient, fixation-specific increase in SO was observed, peaking at one month and only partially resolved by three months; it correlated with functional disability rather than subjective handicap, suggesting that video-oculography warrants further study as a potential pharmacodynamic correlate of cholinergic drug effect in dementia. Full article

Eye tracking is a valuable behavioral signal for human-centered AI, yet the reliability of feature-based machine-learning models for inferring task type and workload across users and tasks remains uncertain, because experimentally defined workload labels may reflect task type and visual structure as much as cognitive demand. The practical problem is that designers of gaze-adaptive systems need to know which inferences are dependable enough to act on, and reported accuracies alone do not answer this, because the choice of prediction target and validation split can determine the result. This study systematically evaluates feature-based machine-learning models with post hoc explainability across three prediction targets: task type, binary load-versus-rest, and three-level workload. Eye-movement features derived from fixations, saccades, pupils, and blinks were extracted from short temporal windows collected from 54 participants performing attention, visual-spatial, and memory tasks under rest, easy, and difficult conditions, and evaluated using leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) and leave-one-group-out (LOGO) validation. Task type was classified most reliably (85.9% LOSO, 83.4% LOGO), binary load-versus-rest showed moderate, validation-sensitive robustness (81.4% LOSO, 63.9% LOGO), and three-level workload classification was substantially more challenging (56.4% LOSO, 44.3% LOGO). SHAP and statistical analyses consistently identified fixation dispersion, pupil-related measures, and subject-normalized features as the strongest contributors across all three targets. These findings show that prediction target definition, validation strategy, and post hoc explainability jointly determine what can be reliably inferred from gaze-based machine-learning models. Eye tracking alone therefore appears promising for task-type recognition and may support coarse engagement-related inference when the deployment task family is represented during model development, whereas task-independent fine-grained workload estimation remains unsupported by the present evidence. Full article

Level 3 automated driving necessitates rapid driver reengagement following a takeover request, making human–machine interface design critical for safety. As a sensor-based in-vehicle interface, the augmented reality head-up display (AR-HUD) integrates real-time environmental sensing with visual information delivery, yet how different information presentation strategies influence driver visual attention during takeover remains underexplored. We examined the effects of presentation form (static/dynamic) and presentation timing (concurrent/progressive) using a 2 × 2 within-subject design. In the experiment, twenty-one licensed drivers viewed prerecorded automated driving takeover scenarios. Eye tracking measured mean fixation duration, mean saccade amplitude, time to first fixation, and fixation count, while ratings assessed usability, acceptance, and intention comprehension. Progressive presentation significantly reduced all eye-tracking measures and improved perceived usability ratings compared with concurrent presentation. This pattern indicates more concentrated and orderly gaze allocation and is consistent with lower visual-search and information-integration demands. However, the lower fixation count may partly reflect reduced information exposure. Static presentation reduced mean fixation duration but showed no consistent overall advantage on the remaining measures. Significant form-by-timing interactions showed that progressive presentation reduced saccade amplitude and time to first fixation and improved intention comprehension under static, but not dynamic, presentation. Among the four combinations, static-progressive presentation yielded the most favorable overall pattern. Overall, presentation timing affected more measured outcomes than presentation form. These findings provide preliminary evidence that presentation form and presentation timing shape gaze behavior and subjective evaluations of AR-HUD takeover displays. Full article

It is widely proposed that perceptual expertise is characterized by an increased reliance on peripheral visual information during search, as described by Holistic Visual Processing (HVP) theory. HVP predicts that experts make longer saccades to construct a holistic representation of the visual scene and facilitate target detection. Our previous work challenged this prediction by showing that expert architects made shorter, rather than longer, saccades during visual search. The present study investigated how this atypical search strategy develops by comparing expert architects, intermediate architects, and naïve observers performing the same visual search task. Intermediate architects exhibited shorter saccades than naïve observers, but not to the extent observed in experts, while demonstrating search efficiency intermediate to the two groups. Analyses of the temporal organization of search further revealed that intermediate architects had already adopted the overall structure of the expert search strategy despite not yet exhibiting expert-level reductions in saccadic amplitude. These findings suggest that perceptual expertise in architecture develops through a layered progression in which the organization of visual search precedes the full refinement of eye movement behavior. More broadly, these findings suggest that eye movement research should interpret gaze metrics such as saccadic amplitude within the context of domain-specific task demands and developmental stage, while considering the temporal organization of search as an additional window into the emergence of perceptual expertise. Full article

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit atypical patterns of visual attention allocation and social-cue processing. Eye-tracking scanpath (ETSP) retains information about fixation points, saccade paths and their temporal changes in the form of images, providing an intuitive and computable data representation for analyzing ASD-related visual attention patterns. However, in ASD auxiliary identification studies, the same participant often generates multiple eye-tracking recordings or multiple visual representation samples. If participant independence is not properly considered during model evaluation, the training and test sets may share individualized eye-movement patterns from the same child. In such cases, the model may learn subject-specific characteristics rather than stable and transferable ASD-related visual attention features, leading to an overestimation of its recognition ability on unseen participants. To address this issue, we propose a Global–Local Collaborative Fusion Network (GLCF-Net) under a strict participant-independent splitting protocol. Specifically, the proposed method first maps ETSP images into patch token sequences through a shared Patch Embedding layer. A CNN-based local branch is then used to extract local trajectory morphology, path density, and spatial neighborhood structure, while a ViT-based global branch models cross-region gaze transitions and the overall attention distribution. Finally, a gated adaptive fusion module dynamically integrates local and global information to enhance the representation of stable visual attention features. In the primary repeated stratified five-fold participant-level evaluation, averaging the two out-of-fold probabilities for each participant yielded an Accuracy of 87.0% and a ROC-AUC of 93.7%; the original participant split, retained as a secondary analysis, yielded an Accuracy of 83.52% and a ROC-AUC of 90.27%. Under the reported frozen-backbone configurations, the model also showed a balanced pattern across Accuracy, Recall, and F1-score. These results characterize performance for unseen participants within the same dataset and acquisition conditions. Full article

Digitalization and intelligent interaction technologies are transforming museum services, making interactive interfaces important for cultural information access and user experience. Existing studies often examine aesthetics, usability, visual cognition, or emotional experience separately. To address this gap, this study proposes a multi-criteria evaluation method for interactive interface layouts in smart digital museums. The evaluation system includes nine indicators across layout aesthetics, visual cognition, and emotional experience: symmetry, density score, orderliness, total fixation duration, average pupil diameter, saccade count, pleasure, arousal, and dominance. Six layouts were evaluated using layout aesthetics calculations, an eye-tracking experiment with 32 participants, and the Pleasure–Arousal–Dominance (PAD) scale. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the eye-tracking and PAD data. RANCOM and LOPCOW were used to calculate the subjective and objective weights, respectively, and TOPSIS was used to rank the layouts. Ranking robustness was examined through 54 weight-perturbation scenarios, while ranking agreement was assessed using Spearman’s and Kendall’s coefficients and four alternative multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) procedures. L1 ranked first with a relative closeness of 0.876, followed by L5 and L6, while L4 ranked last with 0.120. The baseline ranking was retained in 51 of the 54 scenarios, with a consistency rate of 94.44%. Spearman’s coefficients ranged from 0.943 to 1.000, and Kendall’s coefficients ranged from 0.867 to 1.000. These results indicate relative ranking robustness under the tested scenarios and high agreement within the current dataset. Layouts with balanced spatial relationships, continuous functional modules, and clear visual paths showed more favorable descriptive patterns in visual cognition and emotional experience. The method provides a quantifiable and interpretable approach for comparing smart digital museum interface layouts, while its broader applicability remains to be examined. Full article

Visual display terminal (VDT) tasks are common in safety-critical systems, where operators must continuously monitor dynamic information and maintain situation awareness (SA). This study examined whether EEG and eye-tracking technologies could support the assessment of SA and perceived mental workload in VDT tasks. Short-term incentive conditions were included only as an exploratory contextual factor. Thirty participants completed a SATEST-based VDT simulation task while subjective scales, behavioral performance, EEG signals, and eye-tracking data were collected during the perception, comprehension, and projection stages of SA. Physiological indicators associated with SA differences and workload-related patterns were examined using SART-based and NASA-TLX-based grouping, supplemented by continuous-score Spearman correlation and exploratory linear regression analyses. The incentive analysis was exploratory, underpowered for small-to-medium effects, and was not designed to validate an incentive-based cognitive-state regulation strategy. Saccade-related eye-tracking indicators differed between relatively higher-SA and lower-SA groups across several stages (p = 0.0043 to 0.0457, Cohen’s d = −0.670 to −1.002), while fronto-central relative theta power showed an SA-related difference during the SA1 perception stage (p = 0.0315, Cohen’s d = −0.746). Relatively higher perceived workload was associated with lower SART scores (p = 0.0187), lower SA2 accuracy (p = 0.0175), larger SA3 angular error (p = 0.0151), and lower frontal theta-band and alpha-band absolute power across selected stages (p = 0.0094 to 0.0294). The exploratory incentive analysis showed only a limited stage-specific difference in SA1 distance error, with no reliable differences in overall SART score, SA2 accuracy, SA3 angular error, or NASA-TLX score. Thus, the findings provide insufficient evidence that the present short-term incentive manipulation produced reliable cognitive-state regulation. Overall, these findings provide preliminary support for multimodal physiological assessment in VDT tasks and suggest that the identified physiological measures should be regarded as candidate indicators requiring further validation. Full article

Background/Objectives: Limited evidence exists on the use of eye-tracking technology in infants with disabilities, particularly with motor disabilities. This systematic review examines the eye-tracking metrics, protocols, and feasibility of eye-tracking technology in infants at risk or with a motor disability. Method: This systematic review was conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines and registered on PROSPERO (CRD42024563282). PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL, ERIC, Embase, Scopus, MEDLINE, and the Tobii database were systematically searched, with two independent reviewers screening studies, extracting data, and assessing methodological quality using the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine Levels of Evidence and Standard Quality Assessment Criteria. Results: A total of 15 studies were included with a total sample size of 667 (range 1–123), including 341 boys, 306 girls, and 20 infant genders unreported (M = 10.8 months; SD = 4.8; range 4–24 months). The infants included had brain injury as seen via MRI (4 studies), cerebral palsy (4 studies), or were born very preterm with varying risk factors (7 studies). In these studies, eye-tracking technology provided an objective measure of gaze patterns, gaze duration, fixation frequency, visual assessments, and saccades. Despite Tobii being the most common eye-tracking technology used, protocols varied by study design, duration, stimuli, metrics reported, and settings, making standardization challenging. Conclusions: Eye-tracking technology provides objective eye-tracking metrics that may be used to assess infant development. However, given the heterogeneity of studies, future research should follow standardized stimuli, protocols, and include diverse populations to make definitive conclusions and implications. Full article

Autonomous driving systems relieve drivers from continuous vehicle operation and constant monitoring, allowing them to engage in non-driving-related tasks (NDRTs). However, immersion in such tasks can impair drivers’ perception of both the takeover situation and the surrounding environment. To quantitatively assess drivers’ risk perception capability during takeover, a driving simulation platform was used to design autonomous takeover scenarios involving three types of NDRTs, three takeover request times (TOR), and two obstacle avoidance conditions. A total of forty participants were recruited to complete the driving experiment. Drivers’ eye movement data were collected, and visual metrics—including fixation, saccade, and pupil diameter—were extracted by defining areas of interest (AOIs). A subjective risk perception scale was developed and administered to measure drivers’ subjective evaluations. Together with takeover reaction time, the K-means clustering method was applied to classify drivers’ risk perception levels into three categories: high, medium, and low. The LightGBM algorithm was selected to construct a baseline classification model for assessing drivers’ risk perception levels. Subsequently, the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) was employed to optimize the hyperparameters of LightGBM, resulting in the WOA-LightGBM model. This optimized model demonstrated improved recall, accuracy, precision, and F1-score, reaching 0.9210, 0.9253, 0.9261, and 0.9201, respectively. Furthermore, SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis was conducted to quantify the contribution of eye movement indicators to risk perception assessment. The results revealed that saccade duration in the NDRT areas significantly reduced drivers’ risk perception levels (SHAP value = −0.71), whereas increased saccade duration in the forward road area effectively restored drivers’ risk perception capability (SHAP value = 0.71). In addition, higher risk perception levels were found to enhance drivers’ takeover performance in terms of vehicle control. These findings provide valuable insights for the management of NDRTs and the optimization of autonomous vehicle takeover systems. Full article

Product selection often requires visual comparison between multiple alternatives, and hesitation during this process remains less understood than the prediction of final choice. This study investigated whether hesitation during product evaluation could be characterized using eye-tracking metrics in a task involving six jar-opening devices evaluated for robustness, comfort, and effort level required. Sixty-seven participants completed a visual selection task in which each trial was classified according to participants’ self-reported hesitation after each question. Analyses examined first-fixation behavior, global trial-level eye-tracking metrics, attention allocation across grouped alternatives within hesitation trials, pupil diameter, and qualitative written reflections. Hesitation trials were associated with longer decision times, more saccades, and greater total saccadic amplitude. Furthermore, early orienting also differed, with first fixations occurring earlier in hesitation trials. Within hesitation trials, attention was not concentrated on the selected option; candidate alternatives were the most intensively inspected options when attention was considered per individual model. By contrast, baseline-corrected pupil diameter did not significantly differentiate hesitation from no-hesitation trials. These findings suggest that hesitation can be characterized through a structured pattern of visual behavior involving early attention shifts, more extensive exploration, and attention redistributed across competing alternatives. Full article

Background: The video head impulse test (vHIT) is a standard tool for assessing semicircular canal function through vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) gain and corrective saccades (CS). Although reduced gain accompanied by CS typically indicates vestibular hypofunction, a paradoxical pattern—normal gain with CS—is occasionally observed, and its clinical significance remains unclear. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 1573 patients who underwent both vHIT and bithermal caloric testing between September 2022 and September 2025. Among them, 1174 subjects with normal bilateral horizontal VOR gains (0.8–1.2) were evaluated for CS. CS were defined as at least three consistent refixation saccades on one side, verified visually. Subjects were categorized into Right-, Left-, and Bilateral-CS groups. Comparisons were made between CS(+) and CS(−) sides, as well as among groups, using paired and one-way ANOVA tests. Results: CS were identified in 46.3% (544 in 1174) of subjects with normal VOR gains, most frequently on the right side. The side showing CS exhibited significantly lower caloric responses than the contralateral side (p < 0.001). Bilateral CS were more common in older patients. Canal paresis values indicated that the CS side corresponded to the weaker caloric side, suggesting subtle unilateral hypofunction. Conclusions: Even with normal gain, the presence of CS may reflect mild vestibular asymmetry rather than a benign artifact. In addition, bilateral CS were associated with older age, suggesting a possible contribution of age-related vestibular or compensatory mechanisms. Careful control of methodological biases and integration with other vestibular tests are essential for interpretation. Full article

Clear-cutting often causes negative public reactions due to its visual impact, especially in recreational forests. Understanding how people perceive early regeneration stages may support more socially acceptable management practices. This pilot study investigated how young adults visually perceive early forest regeneration after clear-cutting, with a particular focus on gender differences and attention-attracting elements. Field research was conducted in October in central Poland on a 0.97 ha site with Scots pine regeneration. Participants were studied using Tobii Pro Glasses 2. Over 950,000 visual events were recorded, including approx. 9000 fixations and 900 saccades. Analyses included Areas of Interest, heat maps, and fixation and saccade metrics. Women tended to show longer fixation durations than men in this pilot study (602 ms vs. 458 ms; p < 0.001), particularly in clear-cut regeneration areas, where median values were more than 35% higher. They also had shorter and more variable saccades. Visual attention was concentrated on the boundaries between mature forest and regeneration areas, and on elements that reduced the perceived “nakedness” of clear cuts, such as undergrowth and young trees. These patterns suggest that structural and compositional characteristics of regenerating forest landscapes affect visual attention. The results highlight the potential of eye-tracking methods for studying responses to forest management and landscape perception. Full article