Scarf Plot

In eye-tracking research, a scarf plot (also called a sequence chart) shows which Area of Interest (AOI) each participant looked at, and when. Every participant gets one row, time runs from left to right, and every fixation is a band in the color of the AOI it landed on. Read the rows together to see the order in which people work through a stimulus, where they agree, and who behaves differently.

Scarf Plot card in the workspace: AOI sequences of all participants on the Yarbus Remember clothes stimulus.


Scope	One stimulus, any participant selection
Input	Fixations, saccades, and other eye-movement segments with their AOI hits; event data when the stimulus has it
Metric Library	Not used: the plot draws the segments themselves

Try it: The demo workspace opens with two scarf plots, one on a still image and one on a video with dynamic AOIs.

When to Use It

Order of attention: which AOI participants visit first, and whether they return to it.
Agreement: a column of one color across many rows means most participants looked at the same AOI at the same moment.
Outliers and data quality: participants who never visit an AOI, end early, or have long gaps where the tracker lost the eyes.
Gaze against what was on screen: with event channels, see whether participants looked at an AOI while it was visible, for example in video.

Reading the Plot

Rows: one per participant, labeled on the left.
Horizontal axis: elapsed time in milliseconds. Relative and Ordinal modes change it, see Timeline mode.
Tall bands: fixations, colored by AOI. No AOI (gray) is a fixation outside every AOI.
Thin lines: the other eye-movement types, such as saccades and EyesNotFound, each in its own shade of gray.
Empty space: no data for that time.
Legend: grouped into Fixations (one entry per AOI), Non-fixations, and Event channels. A time range set in the pane is noted in the axis title, for example t ≤ 20087 ms.

Add a Scarf Plot

Load your data: drop the files anywhere on the page, or use Import. See Uploading Data for the supported formats.
In the rail on the left, click Add Visualization, then Gaze behavior > Scarf Plot. When another plot is selected, the new one opens on its stimulus and participants.
The pane on the right opens with the plot’s settings. Pick the Stimulus first.

To move, resize, duplicate, or remove the card, see Plot Manipulation.

Settings

Select the card to open its settings in the Pane (a bottom sheet on mobile). The sections, in pane order:

Stimulus

Choose the stimulus to analyze. Each stimulus has its own set of AOIs.

Edit stimuli & selections: Opens the Stimuli Library to manage stimulus files.

Participants

Filter the eye-tracking data by a participant selection.

Participant selection: All or a saved participant selection. Hide participants without data leaves out those with no recording on the stimulus.
Edit participants & selections: Opens the Participant Library to rename, merge, and build participant selections.

Visualization

Configure the timeline representation mode.

Timeline mode: Choose how the sequence is arrayed along the horizontal axis:
- Absolute: Displays fixations and events plotted in their exact chronological timing (in milliseconds).
- Relative: Stretches each participant’s own session to 0 to 100%, so sequences of different lengths line up for comparison.
- Ordinal: Displays strict sequential order indices of individual fixations, saccades, and other events, discarding exact durations.

Time range / Ordinal range

Defines temporal or index boundaries. The section follows the active timeline mode:

Absolute or Relative: Time range, with Start / ms and End / ms (0 = Auto) limiting sequence start and end times.
Ordinal: Ordinal range, with Start and End (0 = Auto) limiting sequence start and end fixation indices.

Areas of Interest

Narrows which AOIs this plot ranges over.

AOI selection: A dropdown containing All and saved AOI selections; AOIs outside the picked selection count as no-AOI in this plot.
Hide No AOI data: Leaves fixations outside every AOI undrawn and drops No AOI from the legend.
Edit AOIs & selections: Opens the AOI Library to customize names, colors, merges, and selections.

Eye-movement Types

Narrows which eye-movement types this plot draws. Fixation is one of them: a selection without it hides the fixation layer (the tall AOI bands).

Eye-movement type selection: A dropdown containing All and the saved eye-movement type selections. The library ships Just fixations, which keeps the fixation layer and drops every other type; a selection with no members draws no gaze at all, leaving an events-only timeline.
Edit eye-movement types & selections: Opens the Eye-movement Type Library to customize classification categories and selections.

Events

Narrows which event channels this plot draws under each row, in Absolute and Relative modes, whenever the stimulus has event data.

Event selection: A dropdown containing All and the saved event selections (matched by displayed channel name, portable across stimuli). The library ships No events, which holds no channels, so picking it hides the event strips.
Edit events & selections: Opens the Event Library to customize event names, colors, ordering, and selections.

Export

Located at the bottom of the Pane:

Download plot: Opens the Figure Export dialog to save the scarf plot as a PNG or JPG.
Download segments: Opens the Segmented Data export preset to this plot’s stimulus, participant selection and AOI selection, over whole recordings.

Interactivity

Sequence details: Hovering over any fixation, saccade, or event strip displays a tooltip with details (e.g. duration, start/end times, and AOI or event name).
Highlighting: Hovering over a category (fixation, saccade, or specific AOI/event channel) in the legend temporarily highlights all matching segments across all participants and dims the rest. Clicking a legend category toggles a persistent highlight.
Linked hovering: The hovered moment and participant are marked in the other plots of the workspace, see Linked Hovering Across Plots.

Event Channels and Dynamic AOIs

When the stimulus has event data, such as the visibility intervals of dynamic AOIs in a video, each event channel runs as a colored strip under every participant’s gaze row. Overlapping events stack into lanes, and a thin gray line divides participants. Event strips are drawn only in Absolute and Relative modes.

Scarf Plot of the Promo video stimulus with dynamic AOIs: the visibility interval of each AOI runs as an event channel strip under every participant row.

Scanpath: the same fixations drawn over the stimulus, for one participant.
AOI Timeline: how attention is split between AOIs over time, pooled across participants.
Transition Matrix: how often gaze moves from one AOI to another.
Scanpath Similarity: how alike the AOI sequences of participant pairs are.