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The Annual International Conference on Geographic Information Science

GIScience 2016: Geographic Information Science pp 323–337Cite as

Measuring Cognitive Load for Map Tasks Through Pupil Diameter

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9927))

Abstract

In this paper we use pupil diameter as an indicator for measuring cognitive load for six different tasks on common web maps. Two eye tracking data sets were collected for different basemaps (37 participants and 1,328 trials in total). We found significant differences in mean pupil diameter between tasks, indicating low cognitive load for free exploration, medium cognitive load for search, polygon comparison, line following, and high cognitive load for route planning and focused search. Pupil diameter also changed over time within trials which can be interpreted as an increase in cognitive load for search and focused search, and a decrease for line following. Such results can be used for the adaptation of maps and geovisualizations based on their users’ cognitive load.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.smivision.com/en.html.

  2. 2.

    Studies on standard web maps have become quite common recently, e.g. [6].

  3. 3.

    Before the 2013 redesign (classic style); not available online any more (6 May 2016).

  4. 4.

    http://www.openstreetmap.org/.

  5. 5.

    A potential definition of element interactivity here would be the number of elements whose relation needs to be kept in working memory to solve a task successfully without having to keep the relations to or between any other elements in memory.

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Acknowledgement

Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 200021_162886).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation, ETH Zürich, Stefano-Franscini-Platz 5, 8093, Zürich, Switzerland

    Peter Kiefer, Ioannis Giannopoulos & Martin Raubal

  2. School of Computing, Clemson University, 100 McAdams Hall, Clemson, SC, USA

    Andrew Duchowski

Authors
  1. Peter Kiefer
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  2. Ioannis Giannopoulos
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  3. Andrew Duchowski
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  4. Martin Raubal
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Kiefer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Texas at Austin , Austin, Texas, USA

    Jennifer A. Miller

  2. University of California at Berkeley , Berkeley, California, USA

    David O'Sullivan

  3. University of Wisconsin-Madison , Madison, Wisconsin, USA

    Nancy Wiegand

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Kiefer, P., Giannopoulos, I., Duchowski, A., Raubal, M. (2016). Measuring Cognitive Load for Map Tasks Through Pupil Diameter. In: Miller, J., O'Sullivan, D., Wiegand, N. (eds) Geographic Information Science. GIScience 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9927. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45738-3_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45738-3_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-45737-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-45738-3

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