Eye-tracking during remote collaborative communication under noisy, reverberant, and delayed communication transmission conditions.

This study, which is part of a larger study, was designed to monitor eye-tracking parameters during remote collaborative communication. Ninety (45 men and 45 women) participants were divided into 30 teams with three members in each team. Each team built different LEGO models under three communication transmission delay conditions in the following order: No delay, 750 ms delay and 5000 ms delay. One individual served as the LEGO builder, who did not have access to the instruction manual. The remaining two team members provided instructions for building the models. Participants were in separate rooms and communicated via earphones. Background white noise (50 dB SPL) was introduced in the ear canals and reverberation was applied to the transmitted communication. Participants were fitted with Tobii Pro Glasses 2 with a sampling rate of 100 fps for eye-tracking. ANOVA was performed on several eyetracking parameters including fixation rate/minute, total whole fixation duration/minute and saccades rate/minute. The results revealed that the cognitive load/or listening effort was lowest in the 750 ms condition compared to the no delay or 5000 ms delay conditions. Detailed results will be discussed during the presentation. Acknowledgement: Graduate students Sydney Osbarn and Melissa Reyes assisted in data collection.