Objectively Evaluating TV Programs by Using a Viewer's Gaze Direction

We conducted experiments on 26 elementary school pupils to measure the movements of their gaze while they were watching a news TV program for children and analyzed the relationship between the measurements and the pupil's comprehension of the program's contents. The comprehension data were acquired with a quiz-style examination after the experimental TV program. We evaluated the variances of their gaze directions by calculating entropy of the estimated gaze direction probability distributions that were represented as a mixture of two-dimensional normal distributions. The results indicate the variances of the gaze direction for scenes that gave better comprehension tended to be lower. The tendency was noticeable after a keyword utterance related to the answer to the corresponding question