GazePlotter
Documentation Chapters

Eye-tracking Visualizations

GazePlotter offers several advanced eye-tracking visualization tools to analyze gaze and attention dynamics.

Available Plots

  • Scarf Plot: A comprehensive chronological sequence chart showing where participants looked over time, with support for event data overlays.
  • AOI Comparison: Quantitative bar charts that aggregate fixation durations, visit counts, dwell times, and other gaze measurements across Areas of Interest (AOIs).
  • Transition Matrix: A heat map matrix showing the frequency and probability of gaze transitions between different Areas of Interest (AOIs), highlighting visual flow and search sequences.
  • AOI Timeline: Visualizations (Stream, Distribution, Ridgeline, and Heatmap) showing how attention is distributed across Areas of Interest (AOIs) over time in discrete intervals.
  • Recurrence Plot: An N×N matrix revealing temporal self-similarity, showing when and how often a single participant’s gaze returned to the same spatial region.
  • Scanpath: A 2D spatial visualization displaying the sequence of fixations (as circles scaled by duration) and saccades (as connecting lines) directly on top of the stimulus image.
  • Scanpath Similarity: Comparison of participant scanpaths using sequence alignment algorithms (Levenshtein or Needleman-Wunsch), rendered as a similarity matrix or a ScanGraph network.
  • Metric Timeline: A temporal visualization (Heatmap or Line Overlay) showing the progression of a windowed scalar metric (e.g. average fixation duration) across the timeline.
  • Metric Correlation: A statistical visualization (Heatmap or Scatter Plot Matrix/Splom) showing correlations (Pearson or Spearman) between multiple scalar metrics across participants.

Configuration and Settings Pane

Every visualization plot in the workspace is configured via the collapsible Settings Pane on the right side of the window (rendered as an overlay bottom sheet on mobile).

Selecting a plot card automatically opens its corresponding settings inside the pane. Deselecting the plot or clicking the workspace background closes the pane.

The Settings Pane is structured into collapsible accordion sections:

  • Stimulus: Selects the target stimulus and provides access to edit the stimulus library.
  • Participant group / Participant: Selects the target group or individual participant for the analysis.
  • Metric: Configures the underlying metric to calculate and plot. This section integrates directly with the workspace’s global Metric Library. Users can select default configurations or define custom metrics.
  • Visualisation: Contains plot-specific parameters (e.g. orientation, scale ranges, rendering alignments, masking).
  • Time range [ms] or Ordinal range [indices]: Defines temporal boundaries for the plot.
  • Areas of Interest: Filters which AOIs are visible and links to the global AOI customization interface.
  • Export: Down at the bottom of the pane, provides a Download plot… action to export high-quality images.

Plot Configuration: Every individual visualization plot functions as an independent, interactive card in the workspace. For general actions such as moving, resizing, duplicating, or removing plots, see the Workspace documentation.