Dataset of primary school students' eye movements in the geometric shape recognition tasks
Description
In an empirical study, we explored the variety of perceptual strategies used by first-grade students and compared them with adults’ perception. The whole experiment included 64 trials with four quadrilaterals. All figures had 4–6° of visual angle size, and their centers were located at 12° distances from the screen center. There were three experimental factors. The target figure could be either a square or a rectangle. Distractors could be either similar to the target (a square among rhombuses or a rectangle among parallelograms) or dissimilar to the target (a square or rectangle among irregular quadrilaterals), thus determining the complexity of the target figure discrimination. We also varied the target figure's position: figures were prototypical (on their base) or rotated. Thus, we got a 2 × 2 × 2 experiment design with three factors: target, distractor, and rotation. The target area (A, B, C, or D) was quasi-randomly varied for each of the eight trials. The results reveal the contraction of eye movements: with growing expertise, foveal analysis—namely, an inspection of the figures by directing the gaze to their parts—is substituted by extrafoveal analysis—namely, perceiving without looking directly. The variety of observed children’s perceptual strategies demonstrates that theoretical perception of different figures is heterogeneous. Excel file contains sheet with data and sheet with description of the variables. Folder "Stimuli" contains stimuli for the experiment. Folder Gaze Replay contains video with childrens' eye movements through our experiment.