User See, User Point: Gaze and Cursor Alignment in Web Search

Past studies of user behavior in Web search have correlated
eye-gaze and mouse cursor positions, and other lines of research
have found cursor interactions to be useful in determining
user intent and relevant parts of Web pages. However,
cursor interactions are not all the same; different types
of cursor behavior patterns exist, such as reading, hesitating,
scrolling and clicking, each of which has a different meaning.
We conduct a search study with 36 subjects and 32 search
tasks to determine when gaze and cursor are aligned, and
thus when the cursor position is a good proxy for gaze position.
We study the effect of time, behavior patterns, user, and
search task on the gaze-cursor alignment, findings which lead
us to question the maxim that “gaze is well approximated by
cursor.” These lessons inform an experiment in which we predict
the gaze position with better accuracy than simply using
the cursor position, improving the state-of-the-art technique
for approximating visual attention with the cursor. Our new
technique can help make better use of large-scale cursor data
in identifying how users examine Web search pages.