Towards automating fixation correction for source code
Christopher J. Palmer, Bonita Sharif · 2016
During eye-tracking studies there is a possibility for the actual fixation to shift a little when recorded. The cause of this shift could be due to various reasons such as the accuracy of the calibration or drift. Researchers usually correct fixations manually. Manual corrections are error prone especially if done on large samples for extended periods. There is also no guarantee that two corrections done by different people on the same data set will be consistent with each other. In order to solve this problem, we introduce an attempt at automatically correcting fixations that uses a variable offset for groups of fixations. Our focus is on source code, which is read differently than natural language requiring an algorithm that adapts to these differences. We introduce a Hill Climbing algorithm that shifts fixations to a best-fit location based on a scoring function. In order to evaluate the algorithm's effectiveness, we compare the automatically corrected fixations against a set of manually corrected ones, giving us an accuracy of 89%. These findings are discussed with additional ways to improve the algorithm.