Specific parameters of interest were the fixation count (number of fixations inside the AOI), first fixation duration (duration of the first fixation to hit the AOI) and total fixation time (sum of the fixation durations inside the AOI).
Therefore, the task execution energy was defined counting the number of fixations inside the ROI to complete the task: (8) J fix = ∑ ∀ fixations in ROI 1. Equation (8) is the number of steps made to complete the task.
In all simulations, we counted the number of fixations of the variant and divided by the number of runs and compared this with the random expectation (1 /N) to get the ratio of observed versus expected probability of fixation (Pfixo/e).
The task in this experiment was altered in order to remove any requirement for a finger-based button response hence, participants again fixated centrally but here simply had to count the number of fixation color changes present in each run (randomly sampled from 7 to 17).
This may be because, in our methodology, eye gaze points that were part of a saccade were not counted as fixations and was the motivation for the following analysis utilizing the raw gaze datapoints rather than fixations.
Eye movements are composed of fixations and saccades, but even during fixations, the eyes are not completely still.
Expert participants differed from novices in all eye behavior metrics (fixation count, fixation and visit duration for specific actions).
fROIs of the eyes, nose, and mouth had the same area sizes, which enabled us to compare the fixation time and fixation counts of each fROI precisely.
Colonies were counted after fixation in 9% paraformaldehyde and staining with crystal violet for 30 min (Sigma, St . Louis MO, USA).
A saccade was counted between fixation and fixation, between blink and blink, or between fixation and blink.
Tumour nodules were counted after fixation to quantify the tumour burden.
