Visualizing Eye Movements in Formal Cognitive Models

We present two visualization approaches illustrating the value of formal cognitive models for predicting, capturing, and understanding eye tracking as a manifestation of underlying cognitive processes and strategies. Computational cognitive models are formal theories of cognition which can provide predictions for human eye movements in visual decision-making tasks. Visualizing the internal dynamics of a model provides insights into how the interplay of cognitive mechanisms influences the observable eye movements. Animation of those model behaviors in virtual human agents gives explicit, high fidelity visualizations of model behavior, providing the analyst with an understanding of the simulated human’s behavior. Both can be compared to human data for insight about cognitive mechanisms engaged in visual tasks and how eye movements are affected by changes in internal cognitive strategies, external interface properties, and task demands. We illustrate the visualizations on two models of visual multitasking and juxtapose model performance against a human operator performing the same task.