Towards a Flexible, Reusable Model for Predicting Eye Movements During Visual Search of Text

Visual search is an integral component in many human activities. The eye movements produced during such activities can provide valuable information about people’s cognitive processes. This research investigates, with detailed eye movement data analysis and computational cognitive modeling, the perceptual, strategic, and oculomotor processes people use to visually search. A cognitive model is evolved in a principled manner based on eye movement data, past modeling efforts, and recent psychological literature. In the model, re-usable, parsimonious, local strategies interact with perceptual-motor constraints to predict the bulk of the eye movement data, including aspects of the data that appear to require task-specific global strategies in addition to fixationto-fixation local strategies. The analysts evolve a base level model with a random strategy into a robust and reusable model with a flexible strategy that could work with a wide range of visual stimuli.