Do our eyes mirror our information experience?

Abstract

Information eXperience (IX) is hypothesized to be a complex function of the user’s perceived com-plexity, comprehensibility, and interest. This study links these appraisals to eye behavior of 28 subjects. Eye behavior was operationalized by parameters of the eye’s fixations, saccades, and blinks, providing a pattern space. This pattern space was used to develop and validate several models. Random forests, support vector machines, k-nearest neighbors, neural networks, and re-gression models were used to generate these models. These models predict complexity, compre-hensibility and interest, respectively 96.87%, 97.65%, and 90.63% of the cases; but, in parallel, indicate that the relation between the three appraisals is complex. Nevertheless, this research can serve as an initial step towards the foundation of a next-generation wearables that enable true IX, personalized information filtering, access, and retrieval.