Re-viewing performance: Showing eye-tracking data as feedback to improve performance monitoring in a complex visual task

Background: Performance monitoring plays a key role in self-regulated learning, but is difficult, especially for complex visual tasks such as navigational map reading. Gaze displays (i.e. visualizations of participants' eye movements during a task) might serve as feedback to improve students' performance monitoring. Objectives: We hypothesized that participants who review their performance based on screen recordings that also display their gaze would have a higher monitoring accuracy and increase in post-test performance and would remember more executed actions than participants who review based on a screen recording only (i.e. control condition). Methods: Sixty-four higher education students were randomly assigned to a gaze-display or control condition. After watching an instruction video, they practiced five navigational map-reading tasks and then reviewed their performance while thinking aloud, either prompted by a screen recording with gaze display or a screen recording only. Before and after reviewing, participants estimated the number of correctly solved tasks and finally made a five-item post-test. Results and conclusions: Analyses with frequentist and Bayesian statistics showed that gaze displays did not improve monitoring accuracy (i.e. estimated minus actual performance), post-test performance, or the number of reported actions. It is concluded that scanpath gaze displays do not provide useful cues to improve monitoring accuracy in this task. Takeaways: Gaze displays are a promising tool for education, but scanpath gaze displays did not help to enhance monitoring accuracy in a navigational map-reading task.