With the rise of online misinformation and AI-generated text, understanding human perception of news truthfulness is critical. In this study, we examine visual attention and cognitive processing using eye-tracking measures as individuals read fake and real news articles sharing nearly identical structure and imagery, differing only in subtle textual changes. Using the public FakeNewsPerception dataset, we analyze advanced gaze measures, including scanpaths, AOI transitions, and luminance-corrected pupil measures, beyond basic gaze features, in relation to news truthfulness and perceived believability. Results show that, given the high fidelity of the fake news, readers exhibited comparable visual scanning patterns, attention allocation across AOIs, and cognitive load regardless of truthfulness and perceived believability of news. Interestingly, when participants believed a news item, they demonstrated lower focal attention than when uncertain or disbelieving, suggesting that prior belief reduces visual inspection. These findings, supported by behavioral analysis, may help explain human susceptibility to high-fidelity misinformation.

During visual search, individuals’ attention shifts between ambient and focal states in response to task demands and stimuli. The ambient/focal coefficient K is a statistically validated measure of these states, computed offline from fixation duration and saccade amplitude data. While current methods compute K offline, real-time computation could enable applications such as monitoring user attention, creating attention-adaptive user interfaces, and optimizing graphics rendering. However, real-time computation of K requires stable estimates for the parameters of fixation duration and saccade amplitude distributions. Since these distributions are heavy-tailed, the real-time estimates exhibit high variance and slow convergence. To overcome this, we propose a robust parametrization and an alternative estimation method, along with two real-time measures analogous to K. Through a map viewing study involving localization and route planning tasks, we show that our proposed measures exhibit dynamics consistent with offline K.

Eye tracking measures can provide means to understand the underlying development of human working memory. In this study, we propose to develop machine learning algorithms to find an objective relationship between human eye movements via oculomotor plant and their working memory capacity, which determines subjective cognitive load. Here we evaluate oculomotor plant features extracted from saccadic eye movements, traditional positional gaze metrics, and advanced eye metrics such as ambient/focal coefficient , gaze transition entropy, low/high index of pupillary activity (LHIPA), and real-time index of pupillary activity (RIPA). This paper outlines the proposed approach of evaluating eye movements for obtaining an objective measure of the working memory capacity and a study to investigate how working memory capacity is affected when reading AI-generated fake news.

Reading plays a vital role in updating the researchers on recent developments in the field, including but not limited to solutions to various problems and collaborative studies between disciplines. Prior studies identify reading patterns to vary depending on the level of expertise of the researcher on the content of the document. We present a pilot study of eye-tracking measures during a reading task with participants across different areas of expertise with the intention of characterizing the reading patterns using both eye movement and pupillary information.