The Linked Microposter Plots Family as New Means for the Visualization of Eye Tracking Data

Eye tracking has been used in many scientific fields, such as education, usability research, sports, psychology, and marketing. Often, visualization plays an important role in the analysis of eye tracking data. In the past, linked micromap plots have been widely used to visualize geographic patterns of regions and subregions. Based on the idea of linked micromap plots, we introduce three different types of linked microposter plots to visualize the eye movement pattern when people are looking at different components (such as headings, tables, figures, and different sections of text) of scientific posters. These types are basic linked microposter plots, linked timeline microposter plots, and linked scanpath microposter plots. When using linked microposter plots, the eye tracking data of people looking at various poster components can be better and more easily interpreted. Linked timeline microposter plots and linked scanpath microposter plots are extensions of basic linked microposter plots. The scanpath time series information is included in the linked scanpath microposter plots visualization. The linked microposter plots and their extensions provide several features that overcome some of the disadvantages of previously existing eye tracking data visualization methods. The linked microposter plots can be created automatically using our EyeTrackR R package and can be easily extended to other applications.