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I was wondering if anyone out there has found a nice package for R to analyse eye-tracking data?

I came across eyetrackR but as far as I can tell there is no English support documentation available:

http://read.psych.uni-potsdam.de/pmr2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=43:eyetrackr&catid=13:r-playground&Itemid=15

I will move onto another freeware that handles eye-tracking data if I need to but was really hoping there would be something accessible in R.

Ideas?

Cheers.

Docconcoct
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    http://read.psych.uni-potsdam.de/pmr2/attachments/article/43/eyetrackR_0.16.tar.gz has English documentation. – Dieter Menne Feb 24 '14 at 16:00
  • Hi @DieterMenne. Are you referring to the help files? I was referring to the PDFs on the link I provided and they are in German not English. – Docconcoct Feb 25 '14 at 17:55

3 Answers3

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It would help if you could explain which kind of analyses you are intending to do. There are many different approaches depending on the research question and the research field. Many approaches involve the detection of fixations and saccades as a first step. An R package that can be used for fixation detection is called saccades and is available on CRAN. See also the Github page of the package for examples and screenshots.

tmalsburg
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  • There's two things I'm interested in. 1: Comparing eye saccades in a time window from one experimental condition to the same time window in another. 2: Pupil size in the same time windows. Thanks for the links, I'll check them out some time this week when I get a few minutes freed up. – Docconcoct Feb 22 '15 at 13:43
  • Ok, the package may be useful for addressing the first point. The function `detect.fixations` gives you a list of fixations but you can infer the saccade aplitudes, durations, and directions from that data. To address the second point it is probably more useful to operate on the raw samples. – tmalsburg Feb 23 '15 at 18:27
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A new eye-tracking analysis package for R (eyetrackingR) was recently released. It provides a variety of methods that handle data preparation/cleaning, visualization, and analysis.

brockf
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    Thanks for the reply. I'll check it out once I find some time. – Docconcoct Oct 08 '15 at 11:58
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    it does look pretty neat. I've shared it on twitter and with some colleagues. – Docconcoct Oct 08 '15 at 12:19
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    I've been using it a lot for the past month, and it turns out that it is (in my opinion) not very flexible nor very transparent about what it is doing. It probably works perfectly well for the precise example they are walking through, but as long as you get something different you need to re-do most of the functions by hand before being able to use some of the analysis tools it provides. Hopefully this will be added in the future, but at the minute I don't think eyetrackingR is satisfactory for general purpose eye-tracking analysis. – Arthur Spoon Dec 09 '17 at 16:53
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Here's a list of several dozen instances of researcher contributed code (FOSS) for post-acquisition summarization and analysis of eye-movement data. You may be able to find something to suit your needs there.

List is provided in case anyone stumbling across this thread may find it useful.

https://github.com/davebraze/FDBeye/wiki/Researcher-Contributed-Eye-Tracking-Tools

Dave Braze
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  • A link to a solution is welcome, but please ensure your answer is useful without it: [add context around the link](//meta.stackexchange.com/a/8259) so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there, then quote the most relevant part of the page you're linking to in case the target page is unavailable. [Answers that are little more than a link may be deleted.](//stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-answers) – LW001 Sep 30 '17 at 15:50