ET-seminar 2012-02-03: Kerstin Gidlöf about how stages in decision making can be seen in eye movement data

At today's ET-seminar, we discussed how to detect cognitive states such as 'search', 'evaluation' and 'decision' in eye-movement data. Although Kerstin examines decisions in supermarkets, the underlying question about cognitive processes is the same for all search tasks: radiology, psycholinguistics, visual search etc: it is clear that even if we see changes in eye movement behaviour over a task, it is not clear how we build a link to the cognitive processes that allows us to say when stages start and end? Should the division be based on theory (decision making theory, in Kerstins case), or on data alone? Kerstin chose to start from Russo and Leclerc's suggestion that the border between the orienting phase and the decision phase is when the first refixation (redwell) is made, but changed it to when the participant first looks at the item to be selected (bought). This change moves the border to later in the process, and makes data values such as dwell time and redwells between between phases more different (stronger significance values). This is still a theory-based division, but it appears to be more exact than that of Russo and Leclerc. Many questions still remain. Are there only three stages, for instance? Could orientation, decision and evaluation be interleaved in short spurts as consumers work their way through a pasta shelf; which would speak in favor of a data-driven analysis. Next Friday, Damon Tutunjian presents his plans to record reading data on implicit agent activation in adjectival vs. verbal passives. The full program for the eye-tracking seminar can be found at http://wiki.humlab.lu.se/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=public:eyetracking_seminar Posted by kenneth on 2012-02-03 13:27:46

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