Enhancing Eye Tracking of Source Code: A Specialized Fixation Filter for Source Code

Abstract

The present state of the art in gaze processing algorithms, for eye tracking data, targets general purpose application in studies using a variety of stimuli (prose, images, or video). This work proposes the development of a gaze processing algorithm specialized to support eye tracking in the field of software engineering. Enhancements to fixation identification with respect to source code tokens can have wide reaching implications for researchers and practitioners using eye tracking with software engineering tasks. This work will require infrastructure improvements to the iTrace framework and additional study to contextualize the relevance of individual source code tokens during comprehension activities. Details concerning the nature of the improvements and a plan research and development on this problem is presented.