A Task-Based View on the Visual Analysis of Eye Tracking Data

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Visualization and eye tracking pipeline

The visual analysis of eye movement data has become an emerging field of research leading to many new visualization techniques in recent years. These techniques provide insight beyond what is facilitated by traditional attention maps and gaze plots, providing important means to support statistical analysis and hypothesis building. There is no single all-in-one visualization to solve all possible analysis tasks. In fact, the appropriate choice of visualization technique depends on the type of data and analysis task. We provide a taxonomy of analysis tasks that is derived from literature research of visualization techniques and embedded in our pipeline model of eye tracking visualization. Our task taxonomy is linked to references to representative visualization techniques and, therefore, it is a basis for choosing appropriate methods of visual analysis. We also elaborate on how far statistical analysis with eye tracking metrics can be enriched by suitable visualization and visual analytics techniques to improve the extraction of knowledge during the analysis process.