Gaze as a Proxy for Cognition and Communication

Abstract

We investigate the potential of gaze as a predictor for the quality of dialogue and the level of understanding in collaborative problem-solving. We unveil a triangular relation among collaborators' dialogue, their gaze pattern, and their performance in the context of a pair programming task. Pairs of participants were asked to understand a JAVA program while their gaze was synchronously recorded. The performance was measured as the level of understanding attained by the pair at the end of the program comprehension task. Gaze patterns were analyzed based on probabilistic hit based areas of interest called gaze tokens. A novel dialogue coding scheme was developed to capture the program description as well as collaboration management aspect of pair program understanding. Both the areas of interest and the dialogue codes reflect top-down and bottom-up program comprehension strategies. Results show that it is possible to relate gaze to the level of abstraction in dialogue and to the level of understanding.