Attentional Drift: An Exploratory Study Into the Development of an Attention Monitoring System Based on Human Eye Fixation

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA518630&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

Attentional Drift: An Exploratory Study Into the Development of an Attention Monitoring System Based on Human Eye Fixation

AUTHOR LCDR Douglas M. Magedman, USNR



This study was designed to determine if future research into the development of an attention monitoring device based on eye fixation duration is both feasible and warranted. Attentional Drift is an insidious form of distraction where primary task attention is slowly eroded by secondary tasking. It most often occurs in very low or very high cognitive demand situations. Recent studies have shown that eye fixation duration and glance duration measures are related to attentional demand in visual tasks. In this study, participants completed two 20-minute driving periods in a STISIMTM simulator wearing a head-mounted eye-tracking system. Eye fixation measures recorded in a single-task low mental demand test did not show an expected increase in eye fixation duration over time in all but a few participants. A second test incorporating dual tasking through conversation did show that eye fixation duration values were affected by the added cognitive workload. Eye fixation measures showed statistically significant changes in duration as a direct result of varying secondary cognitive demand. It is concluded that further experimentation with significantly lengthened test runs incorporating an eye blink rate factor, a gaze dwell time function, and a fixed-base eye-tracking system is both feasible and warranted.