Peer-reviewed research
The Eye of the Typer: A Benchmark and Analysis of Gaze Behavior during Typing
Alexandra Papoutsaki et al., Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA 2018), 2018
Read the originalRead on October 16, 2026
- What it is
- A lab study by researchers at Pomona College and Brown University that recorded 51 people typing while a webcam and eye tracker followed their gaze. It compares where touch typists and non-touch typists look in the moments around each key press.
- How much weight it carries
- Peer-reviewed conference paper with a public benchmark dataset. The sample of 51 is adequate for describing patterns but does not measure how often each group looks at the keyboard overall, so it supports the direction of the gaze difference rather than its size.
Facts taken from this source
- The gaze study compared eye gaze with the typed character for 51 participants as they typed.
“From the dataset, we compute the distance between eye gaze and the caret location of 51 participants as they type.” (Abstract and results)
- Touch typists keep their gaze on the line of text on screen, while non-touch typists look down at the keys just before each press.
“touch typists stay focused on the line on the screen that the text is written on zeroing in on the characters typed just after a key press, while non-touch typists look straight down just before the key is pressed.” (Results)