Another person's eye gaze as a cue in solving programming problems

Expertise in computer programming can often be difficult to transfer verbally. Moreover, technical training and communication occur more and more between people who are located at a distance. We tested the hypothesis that seeing one person's visual focus of attention (represented as an eyegaze cursor) while debugging software (displayed as text on a screen) can be helpful to another person doing the same task. In an experiment, a group of professional programmers searched for bugs in small Java programs while wearing an unobtrusive head-mounted eye tracker. Later, a second set of programmers searched for bugs in the same programs. For half of the bugs, the second set of programmers first viewed a recording of an eyegaze cursor from one of the first programmers displayed over the (indistinct) screen of code, and for the other half they did not. The second set of programmers found the bugs more quickly after viewing the eye gaze of the first programmers, suggesting that another person's eye gaze, produced instrumentally (as opposed to intentionally, like pointing with a mouse), can be a useful cue in problem solving. This finding supports the potential of eye gaze as a valuable cue for collaborative interaction in a visuo-spatial task conducted at a distance.