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Structural Coupling Between Shannon Entropy and Dwell-Time Entropy Across Emotional and Safety-Critical Visual Tasks
1Department of Industrial Design Engineering, Korea University of Technology and Education, Cheonan 31253, Republic of Korea.
Journal of Eye Movement Research
|July 24, 2026
Summary
Fixation frequency and dwell time entropy measures are strongly correlated in visual tasks, suggesting overlap in how they describe visual attention. However, these gaze entropy metrics should be interpreted within specific task contexts.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Eye-Tracking Research
Background:
- Gaze entropy is used to understand emotional responses, task performance, and situation awareness.
- The relationship between entropy measures based on fixation counts versus fixation durations is not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between fixation-frequency-based Shannon entropy and dwell-time-based entropy.
- To compare these entropy measures across emotional evaluation and safety-critical monitoring tasks.
Main Methods:
- Collected eye-tracking data from 10 participants evaluating automotive designs and 20 participants monitoring nuclear power plant scenarios.
- Calculated Shannon entropy (fixation count) and dwell-time entropy (fixation duration) across Areas of Interest.
- Performed Pearson correlation and simple regression analyses.
Main Results:
- Found strong positive associations between Shannon entropy and dwell-time entropy in both task domains (r = 0.844 for emotional task, r = 0.890 for safety-critical task).
- Observed substantial overlap between the two entropy measures across different visual task contexts.
Conclusions:
- Fixation-frequency-based and dwell-time-based entropy measures show significant overlap, but are not interchangeable.
- Gaze entropy metrics must be interpreted considering task-specific attentional demands (e.g., exploratory vs. focused attention).
