Scanpaths

Funny how things happen. I've been working on my implementation of scanpath comparison for what seems like years now. Then I came across an interesting experimental protocol that I've never heard of before that suggested a very simple and hopefully effective means for collecting eye movements to test my implementation. So above you see my eye movements as I twice look at the sequence 1-2-3-4-5-A-B-C-D-E. The key to scanpath comparison, IMO, is getting character labels assigned properly to clusters of fixations. This yields a string for each scanpath, in this case I have s₁ = abcdefaghijkllm and s₂ = nbecefaghkijollllp. Using string-editing that is used by both DNA sequencing practitioners as well as the diff program, my program produces S_s = 0.61 and S_p = 0.79, which are sequence and position similarity indeces, respectively, in this case "repetitive". There's more to this, but it's going into a paper that I'm working on. My REU students are collecting more eye movement data for me to compare a larger set of scanpaths. I think it should be a decent paper when I'm done with it.