EXAMINING STUDENT INTERACTIONS WITH DISTRACTORS IN PHOTOGRAPHS USING EYE-TRACKING TECHNOLOGY

Geology is among the most visual of the sciences, requiring visual observations and visual-spatial thinking in various contexts. Photographs are one of the main ways that geologists conceptualize and communicate geologic information to professional colleagues and to students. To be successful in undergraduate geoscience courses, a student must construct knowledge of geologic systems from various representations, including photographs and virtual environments.

Eye-tracking technology is a new, exciting tool for geoscience education because it follows and records where a participant looks. The resulting data can then be processed to determine where, how long, and how many times a participant looks at a specific location. We employ this technology to learn how introductory geology students interact with geologic photographs. We strive to answer three main questions: 1) are objects that show scale in photographs distracting or do they help draw the student into an image; 2) if objects included in an image for scale are distracting, is there a more effective way to show scale; and 3) is there a difference in how a student interacts with a 2D versus a 3D image.

One hundred and thirty one introductory geology students were assigned to one of three groups: 1) a group that listened to narration while viewing 16 images, 8 of which contained distractors; 2) a group that listened to narration while viewing the same 16 images with the opposite 8 containing distractors; and 3) a group that listened to narration but did not view images.

In general, when students surveyed photographs containing distractors, including objects that represented scale, they fixated on those objects. When images contained callouts (labels or lines) designed to deliberately draw attention to pertinent information, some students focused only on the callouts and never surveyed the remaining image. Also, when shown a new photograph, students would quickly locate and fixate on any distractor for several seconds, continue to survey the image, and then return to the distractor. In photographs containing a linear feature, such as a fault, the student would scan the linear feature immediately, locate any distractors, and then return focus to the linear feature. Students generally did not look at or fixate on water, the sky, or parts of the photograph that lack texture.