Abstract
When a scanpath descriptor supports a classification, it is rarely clear what the classification rests on. We propose perturbation profiles. Five transformations each target one stated property of every scanpath (fixation order, the coupling of durations to positions, the duration distribution, orientation and handedness, and fine spatial structure) while preserving a listed set of invariants. The classifier is refit, and the change in participant-held-out AUC is the pipeline's sensitivity to that property. Intervals come from a participant bootstrap that refits the classifier; in simulations they were conservative (99.7% coverage; standard errors about 1.8 times the empirical spread). We profiled nine descriptors on thirteen binary problems from three public datasets, with a within-fold AUC and class-balanced folds and a stated rule for which sensitivities to interpret. Of 565 intervals, 95 excluded zero; 80 were robust to the pooled AUC, 20 fold partitions and longer runs (36 of them within +/-0.05 AUC), and 45 also held with boosted trees. Most came from GazeBase (322 participants). Permuting fixation order raised the AUC of a descriptor based on mean saccade amplitude, because permuted amplitude has as its expectation the mean pairwise distance, a measure of spread. A "comprehension" contrast pooled over two programs was a contrast between their layouts: it vanished among trials of the same program, and synthetic gaze drawn from the layout alone reproduced the program contrast beneath it. For native versus non-native readers, spatial jitter at the scale of text lines reduced recurrence's discrimination. A Python package is released.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11632
