 | Richard Knowles The College of New Jersey (Computer Engineering '08)Mentor(s)Eileen Kowler, Ph.D. Karin Stromswold, Ph.D. Brian Schnitzer Department of Psychology Rutgers University |
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| Attention and eye movements during closed captioned videos | ||
| Closed-captioning is crucial to make television accessible to the 28 million hearing impaired people in the United States.) Closed-captions require that people read text and obtain information from visual images simultaneously. This study explores the following: (1) how people look at and integrate information from animated images with captions; and (2) how people read captions and abstract information contained in the sentences. Volunteers were shown 24 animated videos (12 with captions, 12 without captions) and their eye movements were recorded using a Dual Parkinje Eye Tracker. The subjects’ understanding and memory of the captions and the visual stimuli was evaluated by means of comprehension questions. Preliminary results indicate that subjects did very well on the comprehension questions for videos without captions. Results seem to vary, but most subjects were able to find whether at least 2 of the 3 captions displayed in each video were concordant with the video. Subjects tended to get the questions wrong that tested their memory for the closed-captioned videos, but not when videos were viewed without captions. This implies that subjects were unable to successfully divide their attention between video and captions, or remember all the information obtained within the short period. There also was a preference to read the captions and look at the video only occasionally. |