An Empirical Eye-tracking Study Of Preattention And Attention In The Webpage Browsing Behavior

The World Wide Web has increasingly become a ubiquitous information source and communication channel. With such an extensive user population, it is imperative to understand how web users view different web pages in order to provide a cognitive basis for interface design. Being different from the other visual stimuli, web page is a combination of text, images and multimedia. Eye movement is related to different levels of cognitive process. The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristic of pre-attention and attention when browsing the web page and find out how individuals browse the web. The stimuli of this experiment are8different types of web page, including image-based pages and picture-based pages. The first screen page and the middle screen page are also contained. In the process of performing the experiment, the page stimuli are presented to the subjects randomly. The pre-attention phrase will be presented for200ms and the attention phrase will be presented for60s. Subjects need to view the pages as usual and the data of eye movement will be recorded simultaneously. At the end of the presentation, subjects are requested to report the page content, containing features and layout.The characteristic of pre-attention and attention when browsing the web page can be worked out by analyzing the gaze plots numbers, fixation duration and oral report. Through cluster analysis of the fixation duration on each AOIs in the attention phrase, we can get the conclusion of different styles when scanning the web page and characteristics of the attention distribution of different users. The result of this experiment can provide web designing psychological proposals.