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This thesis investigates the knowledge around the field of eye tracking within e-commerce, and specifically CDON. Eyetracking is a powerful tool within usability testing and it makes us as designers see what the user is actually looking at on the screen. This paper will present the design process and through usability testing result in how to gather and later on analyse data to benefit e-commerce. The study contains research around the methods of eyetracking and usability testing for e-commerce within the field of interaction design that results in a developed user experience method, specialized for e-commerce. The final outcome is a method called the 2-competitor method that interaction designers can use to compete the website that they work on to other websites and find valuable information such as design issues or improvements. The method informs competing sites to be used as a tool to improve design.

Mänskligt beslutfattande är en viktig faktor i design processen för system och objekt. Medden snabba utvecklingen av området förstärkt verklighet är det nu möjligt att simuleradigitala gränssnitt överallt. Det finns flera användningsområden både inom industin ochallmänheten där det realiseras med allt ifrån mobiltelefoner till smarta glasögon. I dennauppsats tas ett system fram för att testa hur visuell styrning kan implementeras med hjälpav huvudmonterad förstärkt verklighet. Subtil ledning undersöks också om det kan användas som en digital knuff i huvudmonterad förstärkt verklighet. För att undersöka dettatas en prototyp fram. Genom utveckling av denna prototyp kan ett kontrollerat experimentet genomföras och visuell styrning samt subtil ledning undersökas. Experimentet föratt undersöka visuell styrning är Posner cueing task. Genom att använda ögonspårningsutrustning, kan man mäta reaktionstiderna för sackader hos användarna. Resultatet visaren signifikant skillnad i reaktonstid när vår subtila ledning används. Slutsatsen av dennauppsats är att subtil ledning kan användas som en digital knuff i huvudmonterad förstärktverklighet och denna rapport kan användas för vidare forskning inom visuell styrning iförstärkt verklighet med huvudmonterade bildskärmar. / Human decision making is an important factor in the design process for systems anditems. With the fast developing of Augmented Reality it is now possible to simulate digitalinterfaces everywhere. This allows for several application areas both within the industryand for the public and it can be implemented with everything from cellphones to smartglasses. In this thesis, it is investigated how subtle gaze guidance can be implemented usingwearable Augmented Reality technology. Subtle cuing is also investigated to see if it canbe used as a digital nudge in head-worn Augmented Reality environment. To investigatethis, a prototype is developed. By developing a prototype that can perform a controlledexperiment, the visual guidance and subtle cueing can be examined with a Posner cueingtask. By using eye trackers, saccadic reaction times of the participants are measured andexamined. The result shows a significant change in reaction time when using our subtleguidance than without. The conclusion is that subtle cueing can be used as a digital nudgein a head-worn Augmented Reality environment and this thesis can be used for furtherstudies within visual guidance in Augmented Reality with a head-mounted display.

Studying the field of visual attention in the context of games can help level designers to make the players feel more immersed and increase the general enjoyment of a game. With the help of visual cues, the designers are able to lead the players through the levels without breaking the aesthetics of the game, thus preventing to break the immersion. This study is presenting a method for analyzing visual cues in a 3D adventure platform game. Gathering data with the help of today's eye-tracking technology. The results can ultimately be used as a guideline for future work in the field.

Smarta och hjälpsamma teknologier kommer ut varje år och blir snabbt en del avvår vardag. Teknologierna blir mer och mer medvetna om när och var vi behöverdem och stödjer oss i att nå personliga mål såsom att ta cykeln istället för bilen tilljobbet. Dock har dessa teknologier begränsad funktionalitet när vi inte interagerarmed dem, vilket resulterar i att vi behöver interagera med dem och förlorar fokusfrån andra uppgifter.Vi tror att det ett decennium fram kommer att finnas enkla applikationsgränssnitti glasögon med förstärkt verklighet (AR-glasögon). Förstärkt verklighet kan vara ettkraftfullt verktyg för att skapa ett skikt över den riktiga världen så önskar vi ocksåatt gränssnitten inte stör upplevelsen av den riktiga världen.I denna studie har vi undersökt vilka möjligheter det finns i att skicka visuellastimuli till en användare på ett subtilt eller subliminalt sätt. Slutsatsen är att detinte uppenbarligen går att säga att det visuella stimuli i systemet somimplementerades i denna studie var subliminalt. Dock så kunde vi dra slutsatsenatt tiden det tar att upptäcka ett visuellt stimuli som gradvis ökar med tiden skiljersig mellan användare och att användare är mer benägna att fokusera på objekt somär placerade i ögonhöjd, vilket bör beaktas när man ska bestämma vart visuellastimuli ska placeras. / Smart and helpful technologies are released every year and are quick to become partof our everyday lives. Technologies are becoming more aware of when and where weneed them and help us to achieve personal goals, such as taking the bike instead ofthe car to work. Still, many of these smart technologies have only limitedfunctionality without us interacting with them, resulting in us having to interactwith them and losing focus on other tasks.We believe that a decade from now, some future application interfaces will reside inaugmented reality smart glasses. While augmented reality can be a powerful toolwhen overlaying the real world, we also wish that the augmented reality interfacesdo not break the immersion of everyday life.In this study, we have explored the possibilities of sending visual cues to a user in asubtle or even a subliminal way in an augmented reality setting. In conclusion, thereis no obvious answer to whether a cue in the system that was implemented in thisstudy was subliminal. However, we found that the time it took to perceive a cue thatgradually intensifies with time differed between people and that people are moreinclined to focus on objects placed at an eye-level height which should be taken inconsideration when deciding on where to place visual cues.

We experience the world through our senses. But we can only make sense of the incoming information because it is weighted and interpreted against our perceptual experience which we gather throughout our lives. In this thesis I present several approaches we used to investigate the learning of prior-experience and its utilization for prediction-based computations in decision making. Teaching participants new categories is a good example to demonstrate how new information is used to learn about, and to understand the world. In the first study I present, we taught participants new visual categories using a reinforcement learning paradigm. We recorded their brain activity before, during, and after prolonged learning over 24 sessions. This allowed us to show that initial learning of categories occurs relatively late during processing, in prefrontal areas. After extended learning, categorization occurs early during processing and is likely to occur in temporal structures. One possible computational mechanism to express prior information is the prediction of future input. In this thesis, I make use of a prominent theory of brain function, predictive coding. We performed two studies. In the first, we showed that expectations of the brain can surpass the reliability of incoming information: In a perceptual decision making task, a percept based on fill-in from the physiological blind spot is judged as more reliable to an identical percept from veridical input. In the second study, we showed that expectations occur between eye movements. There, we measured brain activity while peripheral predictions were violated over eye movements. We found two sets of prediction errors early and late during processing. By changing the reliability of the stimulus using the blind spots, we in addition confirm an important theoretical idea: The strength of prediction-violation is modified based on the reliability of the prediction. So far, we used eye-movements as they are useful to understand the interaction between the current information state of the brain and expectations of future information. In a series of experiments we modulated the amount of information the visual system is allowed to extract before a new eye movement is made. We developed a new paradigm that allows for experimental control of eye-movement trajectories as well as fixation durations. We show that interrupting the extraction of information influences the planning of new eye movements. In addition, we show that eye movement planning time follow Hick's law, a logarithmic increase of saccadic reaction time with increasing number of possible targets. Most of the studies presented here tried to identify causal effects in human behavior or brain-computations. Often direct interventions in the system, like brain stimulation or lesions, are needed for such causal statements. Unfortunately, not many methods are available to directly control the neurons of the brain and even less the encoded expectations. Recent developments of the new optogenetic agent Melanopsin allow for direct activation and silencing of neuronal cells. In cooperation with researchers from the field of optogenetics, we developed a generative Bayesian model of Melanopsin, that allows to integrate physiological data over multiple experiments, include prior knowledge on bio-physical constraints and identify differences between proteins. After discussing these projects, I will take a meta-perspective on my field and end this dissertation with a discussion and outlook of open science and statistical developments in the field of cognitive science.

Seeing is more than sight: it is the entire action-perception loop involved in taking in the world around us. Unlike a camera, our eyes can only resolve a small part of the environment sharply. Therefore, we must constantly move our eyes to scrutinise the parts of our environment that seem most worthy of our highest visual acuity. Eye movements are thus the observable consequences of a complex and crucial decision-making process that is fundamental to how we interact with the world. This thesis investigates properties and the neural basis of eye-movement behavior in humans and monkeys. In the interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive science, the thesis spans fields and utilizes computational models as explanatory vehicles. A central theme is the so-called saliency map model of attention, the de facto computational model of viewing behavior. The saliency map model assumes that attention is directed at the peaks of a map that encodes the saliency of locations in the visual field. Saliency can roughly be thought of as how worthy a location is of attention. It forms a common currency that allows different processes to influence the distribution of attention. The four different studies in this thesis provide four different perspectives on viewing behavior and the saliency map model. The first study establishes a methodology to evaluate the predictive power of models of viewing behavior, and determines which properties of viewing behavior are important for this evaluation. Applying this methodological foundation to the saliency map model reveals that state-of-the-art models do not provide satisfactory explanations of viewing behavior. The second study investigates spatio-temporal properties of eye-movements, finding that observers often re-fixate locations in pictures and that their eye movements possess a rich spatio-temporal structure. These results speak directly against a causal role of "inhibition of return", which is a popular component of many saliency map models. The third study shifts focus to the neural basis of the oculomotor behaviour. fMRI is used to probe the relationship between the computation of saliency and actual processing in the brain. Our results, in contrast to those of other studies, suggest that early visual areas do not compute saliency, but instead compute visual features upon which the saliency map operates. Much of what we know about the neural basis of oculomotor control comes from invasive studies in animals, but it is unclear to what extent saliency computations are comparable between species. Thus, the fourth study compares the viewing behavior of monkeys and humans, to look for evidence of the same underlying processes. We find a strong similarity between the species in saliency-driven viewing behavior. The many saliency-processing areas that have been identified in monkeys therefore likely have a role in saliency processing in the human brain as well. This thesis contributes to our understanding of oculomotor control on multiple levels. The results in this thesis suggest that models of viewing behavior should treat saccade-target selection as a dynamic process where past decisions influence future decisions and where saliency varies over time. This selection process likely takes place in a distributed network in the brain which receives bottom-up input from early visual areas. Encouraged by these results, we speculate that normative and embodied models of cognition offer an explanation of oculomotor control that takes these results into account. In turn, explaining oculomotor control is an important part of the much deeper question of how our mind interacts with the world.

In everyday life our eyes are exposed to massive amounts of visual stimuli. However, even though the stimuli’s features grab our attention, we have a natural tendency to focus on the centre of the scenes. This central spatial bias is not steady; in fact, while freely viewing a scene, the eyes shift towards the left for two seconds and then return to the centre (Ossandón, Onat, & König, 2014). The leftward spatial bias has also been reported in other behavioural studies, suggesting the role of the lateralization of the attention network. The attention network is activated dominantly on the right hemisphere when detecting new/novel stimuli, causing stronger effects on the contralateral (left) hemispatial side. Hence, in this thesis a series of behavioral studies were conducted using an eye-tracking technique to modulate the leftward spatial bias using different types of primes. Five different eye-tracking experiments were performed in the Neurobiopsychology (NBP) Department at Osnabrück University to investigate the interplay between the horizontal spatial bias and multiple different primes displayed prior to the presentation of images in free viewing tasks. The goal of Experiment 1 was to investigate if different reading directions can alter the leftward spatial bias. The results showed that native right-to-left (RTL) readers showed RTL spatial bias after reading RTL texts and left-to-right (LTR) spatial bias after reading LTR texts. This result suggests the dynamic role that the reading direction has on modifying the horizontal spatial bias. On the other hand, native LTR readers who learned RTL languages later in life showed a leftward spatial bias after reading both LTR and RTL texts. While these results suggest the crucial role of mastering RTL languages in modulating the spatial bias, a larger sample size is required to confirm these findings. The aim of Experiment 2 was to investigate if the reader’s second language has a different effect than his/her native language on the leftward spatial bias. Compared to native language LTR texts, LTR/LTR bilinguals demonstrated a slight increase in the leftward spatial bias after reading second language LTR texts. This finding demonstrates the effect that the second language has on enhancing and reinforcing the leftward spatial bias. The goal of Experiment 3 was to study the difference between habitual reading and non-habitual reading (mirrored reading) on the leftward spatial bias. LTR bilinguals read LTR and mirrored LTR (mLTR) texts prior to image exploration and showed a strong leftward bias after reading both texts. The outcome of this experiment suggests that there is an influence of habitual (normal LTR) reading and not of non-habitual (mLTR) reading on the horizontal spatial bias, even though the same language was used in the primes. Experiment 4 investigated if the oculomotor control of the eye movement, without reading, can modulate the leftward spatial bias as in habitual reading. Thus, LTR and RTL moving-dot primes without reading were presented prior to image exploration, mimicking the readers’ eye movement. Native LTR readers showed a leftward bias after primed with LTR and RTL moving-dots. However, in a pilot study within this experiment, native RTL bilinguals demonstrated rightward bias after RTL moving-dots and a weak leftward bias after LTR moving-dots. These findings strengthen the effect of the habitual reading direction and exclude the role of language in reshaping the leftward horizontal bias. Following this, Experiment 5 studied the effect of different factors, including age, gender, first language, second language, second language proficiency, and age of second language acquisition, on the magnitude of the horizontal spatial bias. This Experiment is considered an extension of Experiment 1 in order to study the interindividual differences among native RTL readers after reading RTL texts in a free viewing task. Compared to the native LTR/LTR readers of Experiment 2, the rightward spatial bias among individuals of native RTL readers was strong and profound, but with a large variance of the measurements, suggesting inter-individual differences. This study found no correlation between the magnitude of the RTL spatial bias and the age, gender, first language, second language, second language proficiency, and age of second language acquisition of the participants. Thus, these findings strengthen the profound role that the habitual reading direction has on the RTL spatial bias, regardless of the biological and cultural variables mentioned above. Overall, the thesis proves that the RTL habitual reading direction has a flexible role in modulating the leftward spatial bias (Experiment 1). In addition, the LTR habitual scanning direction can reinforce the leftward bias among native LTR readers to a certain degree (Experiment 2). Yet, non-habitual reading process (Experiment 3) and oculomotor control without language involvement (Experiment 4) showed no influence on the horizontal spatial bias. Moreover, there was no evidence to suggest whether or not age, gender, first language, second language, second language proficiency, and age of second language acquisition influence the magnitude of the rightward horizontal spatial bias (Experiment 5). This leads to the conclusion that forming a habit of scanning direction is a strong factor in changing the natural spatial bias. Furthermore, even though no correlation was found between several biological/cultural factors and the magnitude of the RTL spatial bias, certain speculations can be proposed. First, the strength of the LTR and RTL scanning habits among RTL individuals could lead to an antagonizing effect and yield to interindividual differences. Second, the interindividual differences at the structural and functional cortical level among healthy individuals could cause interindividual differences in the horizontal spatial bias. Third, the narrow group sample of the LTR readers could lead to a small variance in comparison to the diversity of the RTL group sample. Overall, these five experiments have shed light on the dynamic effect of reading direction on the natural spatial bias and opened the door for potential cross-cultural studies regarding visuospatial attention.

The real-world sensorimotor paradigm is based on the premise that sufficient ecological complexity is a prerequisite for inducing naturally relevant sensorimotor relations in the experimental context. The aim of this thesis is to embed visual attention research within the real-world sensorimotor paradigm using an innovative mobile gaze-tracking system (EyeSeeCam, Schneider et al., 2009). Common laboratory set-ups in the field of attention research fail to create natural two-way interaction between observer and situation because they deliver pre-selected stimuli and human observer is essentially neutral or passive. EyeSeeCam, by contrast, permits an experimental design whereby the observer freely and spontaneously engages in real-world situations. By aligning a video camera in real time to the movements of the eyes, the system directly measures the observer’s perspective in a video recording and thus allows us to study vision in the context of authentic human behaviour, namely as resulting from past actions and as originating future actions. The results of this thesis demonstrate that (1) humans, when freely exploring natural environments, prefer directing their attention to local structural features of the world, (2) eyes, head and body perform distinct functions throughout this process, and (3) coordinated eye and head movements do not fully stabilize but rather continuously adjust the retinal image also during periods of quasi-stable “fixation”. These findings validate and extend the common laboratory concept of feature salience within whole-body sensorimotor actions outside the laboratory. Head and body movements roughly orient gaze, potentially driven by early stages of processing. The eyes then fine-tune the direction of gaze, potentially during higher-level stages of visual-spatial behaviour (Studies 1 and 2). Additional head-centred recordings reveal distinctive spatial biases both in the visual stimulation and the spatial allocation of gaze generated in a particular real-world situation. These spatial structures may result both from the environment and form the idiosyncrasies of the natural behaviour afforded by the situation. By contrast, when the head-centred videos are re-played as stimuli in the laboratory, gaze directions reveal a bias towards the centre of the screen. This “central bias” is likely a consequence of the laboratory set-up with its limitation to eye-in-head movements and its restricted screen (Study 3). Temporal analysis of natural visual behaviour reveals frequent synergistic interactions of eye and head that direct rather than stabilize gaze in the quasi-stable eye movement periods following saccades, leading to rich temporal dynamics of real-world retinal input (Study 4) typically not addressed in laboratory studies. Direct comparison to earlier data with respect to the visual system of cats (CatCam), frequently taken as proxy for human vision, shows that stabilizing eye movements play an even less dominant role in the natural behaviour of cats. This highlights the importance of realistic temporal dynamics of vision for models and experiments (Study 5). The approach and findings presented in this thesis demonstrate the need for and feasibility of real- world research on visual attention. Real-world paradigms permit the identification of relevant features triggered in the natural interplay between internal-physiological and external-situational sensorimotor factors. Realistic spatial and temporal characteristics of eye, head and body interactions are essential qualitative properties of reliable sensorimotor models of attention but difficult to obtain under laboratory conditions. Taken together, the data and theory presented in this thesis suggest that visual attention does not represent a pre-processing stage of object recognition but rather is an integral component of embodied action in the real world.

The diploma thesis deals with the identification of elements that play a significant role in increasing the conversion rate of e-commerce websites and offers a more detailed look at several selected elements in terms of UX. The thesis also includes an assessment of the efficiency of the layout of selected elements. Qualitative me-thods – eye-tracking (n = 35), user testing (n = 36), in-depth interviews (n = 36) and quantitative method in the form of a questionnaire survey (n = 309) were used to fulfill the objective of the thesis. Based on the results, recommendations were for-mulated not only for the selected websites, but also applicable for various types of e-commerce websites.