System and method for calibrating and normalizing eye data in emotional testing

Abstract

A system and method is provided for calibrating and normalizing eye data of one or more subjects prior to and / or during emotional testing of the subjects. In particular, initially performing one or more calibration or normalization operations prior to an emotional test of a subject may result in accurate evaluations of emotional responses based on measurements of eye data. Additionally, further calibration or normalization performed during the emotional test may be used to refine the initial calibration or normalization, further increasing the accuracy of the evaluated emotional responses.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The invention relates to calibrating and / or normalizing eye data for one or more subjects prior to, during and / or after emotional response testing based at least on measurements of the eye data for the subjects.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]In many circumstances, measuring a person's emotional state and / or emotional response to various stimuli may provide valuable information. For example, when marketers, researchers, or other entities desire information relating to emotional responses, various stimuli may be presented to a subject to evaluate an emotional response to the presented stimuli. In general, the stimuli presented to subjects may include a visual stimulus, such as still or moving images, slides, and / or videos. As used herein, a “subject” may generally include, for example, an individual respondent, person, or other test subject for which emotional response data may be desired. In any particular data collection, analysis, or other session test...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

"The invention provides a system for calibrating and normalizing eye data of subjects for emotional testing. The system includes a calibration phase where the subject is led through a gaze calibration process to determine the validity of the collected gaze data. The calibration phase may also include a short pause before proceeding to a subsequent calibration process. The system may cause the monitor to display a fixation indicator to draw the subject's attention to a particular location when the gaze calibration is complete. The invention also includes various normalization techniques to account for variations in emotional baseline values, response profiles to light intensity, and other factors that may impact emotional responses of test subjects."

Problems solved by technology

However, simply calibrating for gaze fails to appreciate that different test subjects can often have different emotional profiles and / or different emotional states at the time of testing (e.g., accurately evaluating a subject's emotional response to a stimulus may depend on whether the subject was happy, angry, confused, or in another emotional state when the test began).

However, these techniques have a limited effect.

For example, in some circumstances, merely attempting to induce a neutral emotional state can lead to flawed test results due to differences among test subjects relating to, among other things, emotional profiles, responses to the presumptively emotionally neutral stimuli, ocular physiological characteristics (e.g. pupil size, pupil dilation range, response time, blink characteristics, eye movement characteristics), and / or other differences.

In another example, problems can arise because various subjects may look at different portions of a monitor before test stimuli are shown, or worse, subjects may look away from the monitor altogether.

These variations, among others, can often lead to errors in the measurement of emotional response.

Existing and known techniques for calibrating and normalizing eye data to be used in emotional response testing suffer from these and other drawbacks.

Images