An Empirical Study on the Patterns of Eye Movement during Summarization Tasks

Eye movement patterns are the order in which keywords or sections of keywords are read. These patterns are an important component of how programmers read source code. One strategy for determining how programmers perform summarization tasks is through eye tracking studies. These studies examine where people focus their attention while viewing text or images. In this study, we expand on eye tracking analysis to determine the eye movement patterns of programmers. We begin the study with a qualitative exploration of the eye movement patterns used by 10 professional programmers from an earlier study. We then use what we learned qualitatively to perform a quantitative analysis of those patterns. We found that all ten of the programmers followed nearly identical eye movement patterns. These patterns were analogous to eye movement patterns of reading natural language.

I. Introduction

Eye movement patterns are the sequences or order of eye movements that people use to read words [1]. These patterns are usually researched with respect to natural language text. Areas of patterns research involving natural language text include ad placement in phone books [2], web site design [3], newspaper layout [1], etc. Reading natural language prose is different enough from reading programming languages that eye movement patterns from natural language cannot necessarily be applied to programming languages [4]. For example, advertisements include pictures and have strict size limitations. Programming languages, in contrast, typically do not have pictures and do not have strong screen size restrictions.