Gaze Analysis in Spot the Difference

Abstract

The ability to see and find things is very important in our daily lives. For example, when looking for mistakes in debugging a program, or when looking for misspellings in documents, etc., the visual sense is mainly used. The search may or may not be successful. Is there any difference in the way of searching when the search is successful or unsuccessful? The aim of this study is to analyse the gaze while searching and to clarify the differences between successful and unsuccessful searches, using ‘spot the difference’ as a subject. We have developed an experimental application to measure people's gaze while they are looking ‘spot the difference'. In the experiment conducted in this study, 29 subjects have asked to perform ‘spot the difference’ of multiple problems and their gaze have been measured. Analysis of the data obtained from this experiment shows that in many cases, subjects who could not find a difference were not looking at the location of the difference. On the other hand, the existence of ‘cases of looking but not finding’, in which the difference is not detected even though the difference is fully looked at, is also identified. In the present experiment, ‘looking but not finding’ cases account for 15% of all non-correct responses in all questions.