The critical temporal delay between gaze shift and visual feedback for maintaining a sense of agency – Gaze-contingent multiresolutional display study.
Gaze-based human-computer interaction has recently begun utilizing gaze-contingent multiresolutional displays, which render high-resolution images in the human viewer’s central vision area and low resolution in their peripheral area. However, temporal delays between gaze shifts and multiresolutional display updates are unavoidable. The critical temporal delay that allows for practical applications while maintaining a good user experience remains unknown. While the sense of agency (SOA) toward own hand movements have been thoroughly investigated, to the best of our knowledge this study is the first to show SOA’s temporal property at own eye movements. To determine the critical temporal delay for maintaining gaze agency, we performed a simple visual search for Chinese characters with gaze-contingent foveated window. The relative temporal delay between the single-letter-sized window and eye movement varied from 0 to 4000 ms. A recorded gaze behaviour condition was also conducted as a control. Self-reported SOA scores and calculated controllability scores of the window decreased as the temporal delay increased. SOA was lowest above 200 ms of temporal delay. Distribution of the fixation duration differed between that of more and less than 200 ms. These results indicate the potential Influences of attenuating SOA on fixation duration as well as some relevant processes. The results of this study are consistent with previously reported SOA time courses using hand movements, suggesting that the underlying mechanism can be similar. Furthermore, the results suggest that temporal delay should be kept within 200 ms to maintain the user’s SOA and controllability when eye-gaze input devices are designed.