Patterns of eye gaze during rapid serial visual presentation

The technique of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), comparable with the riffling of a book's pages to acquire an impression of its contents, has considerable application potential, especially where display space is at a premium. The design of RSVP applications, however, is not straightforward in view of the many, and often conflicting, design decisions that must be taken. Specifically, it is suspected that many of these decisions will impact on the ability of users to effectively perceive the displayed content as far as carrying out a task is concerned. This paper presents an exploratory study in which we investigated the impact of a number of design decisions on users' eye movements. Four RSVP modes were implemented that represent alternative design decisions. Two of these modes were modeled after existing e-commerce applications, and two have been the subject of our ongoing research for some time. For each RSVP mode, a set of images was presented to two participants who were required to respond to the appearance of a pre-viewed target image. In the course of these presentations we recorded the participants' eye movements in order to elicit information concerning potential perceptual difficulties. We propose a novel graphical characterization of RSVP modes, which is appropriate to their correlation with recorded eye gaze patterns, offer an interpretation of the experimental data, and provide a motivation for further research into RSVP. © 2009 ACM.