touchscreen

A occupational hazard of being a scientist’s daughter is being roped into experiments. For this project, we were interested in where children looked when making judgments about pictures. We developed a system where we displayed pictures to children on a computer touchscreen; the children’s eye-movements as they scanned the picture were monitored by an eye-tracker in front on them, and the children then touched the screen to indicate their judgment. We had the children sit on a carseat so that their head stayed in roughly the same position and the eyetracker didn’t lose sight of their eyes. An adjustable arm helped us position the touchscreen at the right distance for each child, while the company Tracksys kindly loaned us an eyetracker. My little girl helped us get it all working and patiently recorded the words we needed for the experiment, so the computer could “speak” in a nice, friendly child’s voice.

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