Smooth pursuit is a physiological phenomenon of human eyes, which can be used as eye-control interaction to avoid the “Midas” problem. This article describes the smooth pursuit properties of continuous variable tasks under Euclid’s algorithm. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of slider speed, initial position of “plus,” and variable value position on smooth pursuit interactions. The initial position and slider speed are combined in 12 combination forms, and the variable value positions are divided into 7 cases. Then, the optimal combination forms and variable value position case are derived. Experiment 1 divided the initial position into four levels of up, down, left and right and divided the slider speed into three levels of 1 deg/s, 2 deg/s, and 3 deg/s, concluding that the optimal combination of initial position and slider speed is that the speed is 2 deg/s and initial position is up. Experiment 2 was conducted on the basis of the conclusion obtained in experiment 1. The position of the variable value was divided into seven cases according to whether the left, center, and right of the smooth pursuit track the variable value appeared. The result showed that the position of the variable value in the center had the greatest influence on the pursuit efficiency. This research has an important value for the parameter set of smooth pursuit in the case of the Euclidean algorithm, it has great guiding significance for building smooth pursuit interaction in the context of the eye-control system.

Multiple-view visualisation leads to additional switching cost on attention management between viewports. In this study, we compare the cueing effect of chromatic and achromatic colours on mitigating viewport switching cost in multiple-view visualisations through the dual-task paradigm. There is a concurrent need for managing attention within and between viewports, and performing a three single-digit mental addition task, which poses challenge for the capacity-limited working memory (WM). Response time and total fixation count support the benefit of chromatic colours in within-viewport attention management. First-pass progressive fixation time reveals that chromatic colours lead to better coherence within the viewport than achromatic colours, and there exist a correction process for attention misguidance in invalid cueing conditions. We employed re-visitation count and duration as direct measures of WM reinstatement. Fewer re-visitation count and shorter duration in the valid chromatic cueing condition indicate that more WM resources were freed up for the primary task, and reduced resources were depleted on overcoming the viewport switching cost. The positive role of valid chromatic colour cues become increasingly evident when more viewports presented simultaneously. The study provides eye movement evidence that chromatic cues can effectively lessen the switching cost on attention management in multiple-view visualisations.

Abstract In the present study, we focus on the priming effect of colour on mitigating the attentional reorientation cost, which is led by re-constructing the frame of reference for attention shift and visual search in sequential presentations of temporal data visualization. The study involves two experiments using complementary recordings of behavioural performance and eye-tracking events. Two aspects of colour primes are highlighted: the prime validity and the colour perceptual accessibility. A task paradigm integrating the feature search and keeping-track task was adopted in our experiments. In Experiment 1 (with a group of 16 participants), we confirmed the colour priming effect by comparing the priming condition to the neutral baseline. Furthermore, global colours that are with high perceptual accessibility generated more evident priming effects than local colours. However, more interferences in misguiding the attention to task-irrelevant regions were found when the global primes were invalid. In Experiment 2 (with another group of 15 participants), we verify the finding in Experiment 1 that global colours produced more pronounced priming effects in alleviating the attentional reorientation cost by comparing two groups of real-world visualizations with either global or local colours as the prime. Large saccades were initiated much earlier, and the search efficiency got improved when provided with global colours. We conjecture that the facilitatory effect from global colours may stem from its benefit on the pre-attentive processing of the search field. The research findings provide evidence for utilizing colours as the primes in mitigating the attentional reorientation cost and accelerating visual search in sequential presentations.