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Session:
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Physics Education Research - Posters
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Paper Type:
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Poster
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Title:
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Investigating Visual Attention in Physics Using Scan-Path Eye Movement Analysis*
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Meeting:
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2012 Summer Meeting: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
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Location:
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N/A |
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Date:
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Time:
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6:00PM
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Author:
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Adrian Madsen, Kansas State University
785-532-1612, adrianc@phys.ksu.edu
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Co-Author(s):
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Adam Larson, Amy Rouinfar, Lester Loschky, N. Sanjay Rebello
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Abstract:
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Two types of processes, top-down and bottom-up, guide visual attention. Bottom-up processes are fast, automatic processes based on noticeable features in the environment. Top-down processes are based on prior knowledge, goals, and expectations. To investigate how top-down and bottom-up processes influence visual attention in physics problems, we recorded eye movements of 24 individuals on problems with diagrams that contained areas consistent with novice-like responses and areas of high perceptual salience. We used an algorithm that calculates a similarity score between pairs of participants' eye movements. We compared pairs of correct solvers (CC) and pairs of incorrect solvers (II). We found no statistically significant differences between the CC and II comparisons on five of the six problems. This result seems to imply that top-down processes relying on incorrect domain knowledge, rather than bottom-up processes driven by perceptual salience, influence the visual attention of incorrect solvers.
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Footnotes:
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*This work supported in part by NSF grant 1138697.
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