Age-related Eye Tracking Study of Reading
COVID-19 Texts with Negative Elements
Anton Popov
Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Taras Shevchenko National University
Institute,
Kyiv, Ukraine
Yurii Havrylets
Taras Shevchenko National University Taras Shevchenko National University
of Kyiv,
Kyiv, Ukraine
2022 IEEE 41st International Conference on Electronics and Nanotechnology (ELNANO) | 978-1-6654-6922-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ELNANO54667.2022.9927118
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv,
Abstract— The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic leads to
the development of stress disorders, increased anxiety in the
society. One of the strongest factors leading to the development
of anxiety, stress in society during a pandemic is the Mass
Media. The mechanisms of stressogenic effects of Mass Media
remain not completely clear. The aim of this study was to
evaluate age-specific characteristics of gaze behavior related to
the perception of anxiety-provoking information. The study
was performed basing on the 189 volunteers (164 participants
aged between 17 and 22 years old (students, control group), 25
people aged between 59 and 71 aged 59 to 71 (experimental
group)). We surveyed participants to determine their level of
stress, depression, and anxiety and analyzed eye-tracking data
during the text perception by using web- tracking (EyePass).
Results showed the significant age-related differences in gaze
behavior while reading text with negative text elements. Aged
adults had shorter median fixation duration. There was no
difference between groups in the amount of the fixation. We
can assume that except age factor other ones might contribute
to our result, namely the occupation of participants, professors
at the Institute of Journalism, with developed professional
skills (reading pattern, method of information perception) but
from other side higher vulnerability to adverse COVID-19
outcomes compared to younger adults.
Keywords— Mass Media, COVID19 pandemic,
behaviour, fixation
I. INTRODUCTION
COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the increased
prevalence of anxiety. According to [1], people experience
anxiety and psychological distress despite being diagnosed
with COVID-19 or knowing anyone with this diagnosis at
the beginning of the quarantine in Germany. Other studies
reveal that generalized anxiety disorder and depression are
common effects of COVID-19 pandemics [2]. Females are
more prone to experiencing higher levels of anxiety [1].
There are several potential causes of this effect.
The first cause is lifestyle changes associated with the
COVID-19 pandemic [3]. The lack of surgical masks,
potential issues with working from home, and fear of
contact with the disease were the main causes of the anxiety
during the first three months of the pandemic [4]. This effect
was moderated by the intolerance to uncertainty [5]. The
increased level of uncertainty in society leads to intense and
general distress, the development of mental disorders,
deterioration of mood (mood) [6, 7]. In the face of
978-1-6654-6922-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE
2022 IEEE 41st International Conference on Electronics and Nanotechnology (ELNANO)
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Daryna Ivaskevych Sergii Tukaiev
Taras Shevchenko National University
of Kyiv, of Kyiv,
Kyiv, Ukraine Kyiv, Ukraine
Alla Petrenko-Lysak Yuliia Yachnik
Taras Shevchenko National University
of Kyiv, of Kyiv,
Kyiv, Ukraine Kyiv, Ukraine
Volodymyr Rizun
Kyiv, Ukraine
uncertainty most people desire to avoid it and make
decisions hastily [6]. Intolerance to uncertainty contributes
to the development of stress, burnout [8], and the latter
makes its negative contribution to the perception of
emotionality of information [9].
The second potential cause of the increase in the anxiety
level is increased mass media consumption. Liu & Liu
(2020) revealed that all kinds of media resulted in vicarious
traumatization with commercial media having the full
mediation effect in mainland China [10]. While new
information is beneficial for uncertainty management [11],
media consumption did not result in improvement of anxiety
symptoms at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic
[12]. There is evidence that media consumption increased
uncertainty, which correlated with non-compliance to
governmental regulations [13]. On the other hand, the trust
in the agency that produced the media message was
associated with a higher level of compliance in Israel in
May 2020 [13]. Overall, mass media are associated with the
increase in anxiety-related to COVID-19. However, the
mechanisms of these processes are not completely clear.
There is evidence about age-related differences in
information processing during reading. These age-related
gaze
differences can be caused by the aging process in eyesight
[14], attention processes [15], and cognitive control
mechanisms [16]. It should be noted that text
comprehension does not decline in the same way due to the
changes in time allocation during the reading [17]. The
elderly also differs from younger adults in semantic
processing of the text by allocating fewer resources for
detecting coherent anomalous noun phrases and more time
for incoherent ones [18]. In addition to these changes that
might affect text comprehension, there are age-related
differences in gaze behavior during reading.
Saccades, fixations, their length, and the occurrence of
rereading are altered by aging mechanisms. Aging is
characterized by the increase in saccades’ latency and the
weakening of the ability to suppress reflective saccades
[18]. According to McGowan, White, and Paterson [19],
older adults have a higher number of fixations and a longer
duration. Changes in gaze behavior result in a lower chance
of fixating on the prescription warning labels in older adults
[20]. While the mechanism for the decrease in fixation time
is unclear, these changes together with changes in attention
310
and cognitive control mechanisms may change the region is considered as fixation. The device used for
perception of anxiety-provoking stimuli. recording the eye tracking trajectories provides the
“calibration error” for each recording, which is the noise
Taking into account the up-to-date information and level of the measured trajectory coordinates, the algorithm
changes in society during the COVID-19 pandemic we set was adapted for finding fixation in the presence of
the following objective for this study: to examine the age- measurement errors. Let
related gaze behavior while reading the anxiety-provoking
text news. X = [ xi , xi +1 ,! xi + N -1 ] ,Y = [ yi , yi +1 ,! yi + N -1 ] are the
II. MATERIALS AND METHODS horizontal and vertical parts of trajectory, where xi - is the
A. Sample i-th sample of the horizontal coordinate, yi - is the i-th
Participants of the study were of two age groups. The sample of vertical coordinate (in pixels), for i = 0! N - 1 ,
first group of 164 people included younger adults aged N is the duration of the observation window in samples.
between 17 and 22 years old (mean age 17.53). Recruitment D
of this group was performed among students of the Institute Horizontal dispersion Dx and vertical dispersion y in
of Journalism at the Taras Shevchenko National University the observation window are defined as
of Kyiv. The second group of older adults included 25
people aged between 59 and 71 years old with mean age Dx = max ( X ) - min ( X )
64.5, who were professors at the Institute of Journalism at Dy = max (Y ) - min (Y )
the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
B. Procedure
All participants of the study provide informed consent
before being involved in the study. After that, all
participants were invited to participate in the first stage of
the study, which consisted of filling the questionnaires. The
participants were asked about their sex, age, experience of
COVID-19 and/or vaccination. Participants were also asked
whether they have a laptop or personal computer with a web
camera in order to evaluate their eligibility for the second
stage of the research, which required these devices in order
to collect eye-tracking data. Along with these questions,
they were asked to fill in Psychological Stress Measure
(PSM-25), Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), and a)
Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment (GAD-7)
questionnaires in order to determine their level of stress,
depression, and anxiety.
The second stage of the research was an eye-tracking
research of text perception. Participants who had a personal
computer or a laptop with a web camera were invited to
participate in the study. A total number of 101 people
agreed to participate in the second study. All of them were
randomly allocated to three groups. The first group read the
positive text elements about COVID-19. The second group
was presented with the text with neutral text elements about
COVID-19. The third group was presented with the negative
text elements within the same text highlighting COVID-19 b)
topic. Only the third group included both younger and older
adults. So only results for the third group will be presented
in this article.
The examples of the raw trajectories for users reading
different types of texts are presented in Fig. 1. Both
horizontal and vertical axes in Fig. 1 are in pixels, for each
user the pixel size is different depending on the computer
screen characteristics. Negative values of the coordinates
mean that the gaze was pointed out of the computer screen
area.
C. Fixation detection
c)
In this work, dispersion-threshold identification
algorithm [21] utilizes the fact that fixation points are Fig. 1. Examples of raw eye tracking trajectories for users reading
grouped closely together for a certain amount of time. negative texts (a), neutral texts (b), and positive texts (c).
Therefore, if the dispersion of the eye gaze trajectory points
is lower than a predefined threshold for a certain time, this

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 T III. RESULTS
If Tx and y are the calibration errors in pixels for
horizontal and vertical axes, respectively, then the fixation is Groups of older adults and younger adults were
identified for the current observation window if compared by the number of total fixations and median
duration of the fixation (median data are presented in Table
Dx £ Tx + DT and Dy £ Ty + DT , II, boxplots for fixation durations are showed in Figure 2
and 3). Since the number of fixations and fixations duration
where DT is the threshold. were not distributed normally, non-parametric statistical
tests were used to determine the difference between the two
In the current work, fixations were detected in non- groups. Mann-Whitney U-test was used to determine
overlapping sliding windows of 200 ms duration. If the whether there is a statistical significance in differences
trajectory deviates less than a calibration error plus a between the two groups. The results revealed that older
threshold within the observation window, it is considered a adults had a shorter median fixation duration (p-value <
fixation. The threshold DT was empirically selected at 100 0.001). However, there was no difference between groups in
pixels, as an estimate of an average distance between lines terms of the fixation count (p-value = 0.1).
on the computer screen where text was presented. To identify the relevance of COVID-19 information, we
Afterwards, the total number of fixations was calculated as compared the perception of positive, neutral and negative
well as its ratio with respect to the total duration of the texts (Fig. 3, 4) and detected rather a negativity bias than
recording for every study group. attraction to the positive or neutral stimuli: fixations positive
vs negative (p-value < 0.01), positive vs neutral (p-value <
0.01), neutral vs negative (p-value < 0.01). It seems that our
TABLE I. DATA SAMPLES FOR EACH GROUP USED FOR THE ANALYSIS data contradicts the earlier results of [22] that indicated an
equally enhanced perceptual identification for meaningful
Total number of Acceptable positive and negative words, than neutral ones. However,
Group
recordings recordings
under the competitive conditions (higher relevance of
Negative, older
adults
20 16 negative information during Pandemic) the perception of
Negative, negative text is characterized by attentional priority.
20 17
younger adults
Positive 26 23

Neutral 35 33

Negative 40 33

D. Data preparation
Eye-tracking trajectory data were collected using
Eyepass (Beehiveor, Ukraine) - a library for gathering
webcam eye-tracking data
[https://beehiveor.gitlab.io/gazefilter/recording.html]. To
define the acceptable recordings, all trajectories were
analyzed to detect the percentage of the actual tracking data
with respect to the entire duration of the experiment. Data
samples where more than 80% of the recording duration
(“acceptable” data) was available were selected and used for
further analysis. After removing recordings with the noise
level exceeding the established threshold, 16 recordings
from older adults and 17 recordings from younger adults Fig. 2. Boxplots for fixation durations in older and younger adults.
remained eligible for the analysis. The number of samples
used for each group is presented in Table I.

TABLE II. MEDIAN FIXATION DURATION AND FIXATION COUNT

Fixation Fixation Fixation count, Fixation count, Fixation count,
Fixation
Group duration, lower duration, upper lower quartile median upper quartile
duration, median
quartile quartile
Younger adults 0.13 0.37 0.93 70.55 74.23 80.31

Older adults 0.10 0.23 0.63 51.02 64.14 77.82

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Fig. 3. Boxplots for fixation number in older and younger adults.
Fig. 4. Boxplots for fixation durations in the entire groups.
Fig. 5. Boxplots for fixation numbers in the entire groups.
IV. DISCUSSION
The results of this research directly contravene earlier
findings on age differences in fixation duration. McGowan,
White, and Paterson (2014) showed that older adults have a
longer fixation time [19]. While these results are statistically
significant, there are other factors besides age that might
contribute to this result. First of all, the occupation of the
study participants should be taken into consideration. As
professors at the Institute of Journalism, older adults
participating in the study may have a different reading
pattern due to professional skills. Second, older adults are
more vulnerable to adverse COVID-19 outcomes compared
to younger adults [23]. This may leverage some changes in
text processing due to the high importance of the text for
satisfying basic needs in safety. Higher vulnerability of
older adults compared with younger adults may result in
differences in attention processes while reading the text with
negative text elements.
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V. CONCLUSION
Therefore, participants showed a negativity bias than
attraction to the positive stimuli, and this is typical during
quarantine. There are significant age-related differences in
gaze behavior while reading text with negative text
elements. While the origin of these differences between
older and younger adults remains unknown, further research
may provide more evidence about the origin of this effect.
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