This computer science thesis presents a computational cognitive modeling work using eye movements of people faced to different information search tasks on textual material. We studied situations of everyday life when people are seeking information on a newspaper or a web page. People should judge whether a piece of text is semantically related or not to a goal expressed by a few words. Because quite often time is a constraint, texts may not be entirely processed before the decision occurs. More specifically, we analyzed eye movements during two information search tasks: reading a paragraph with the task of quickly deciding i) if it is related or not to a given goal and ii) whether it is better related to a given goal than another paragraph processed previously. One model is proposed for each of these situations. Our simulations are done at the level of eye fixations and saccades. In particular, we predicted the time at which participants would decide to stop reading a paragraph because they have enough information to make their decision. The models make predictions at the level of words that are likely to be fixated before a paragraph is abandoned. Human semantic judgments are mimicked by computing the semantic similarities between sets of words using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) (Landauer et al., 2007). We followed a statistical parametric approach in the construction of our models. The models are based on a Bayesian classifier. We proposed a two-variable linear threshold to account for the decision to stop reading a paragraph, based on the Rank of the fixation and i) the semantic similarity (Cos) between the paragraph and the goal and ii) the difference of semantic similarities (Gap) between each paragraph and the goal. For both models, the performance results showed that we are able to replicate in average people's behavior faced to the information search tasks studied along the thesis. The thesis includes two main parts: 1) designing and carrying out psychophysical experiments in order to acquire eye movement data and 2) developing and testing the computational cognitive models.
Computational cognitive modeling of information search using eye movement data.