Prediction of Attention Groups and Big Five Personality Traits from Gaze Features Collected from an Outlier Search Game

This study explores the intersection of personality, attention and task performance in traditional 2D and immersive virtual reality (VR) environments. A visual search task was developed that required participants to find anomalous images embedded in normal background images in 3D space. Experiments were conducted with 30 subjects who performed the task in 2D and VR environments while their eye movements were tracked. Following an exploratory correlation analysis, we applied machine learning techniques to investigate the predictive power of gaze features on human data derived from different data collection methods. Our proposed methodology consists of a pipeline of steps for extracting fixation and saccade features from raw gaze data and training machine learning models to classify the Big Five personality traits and attention-related processing speed/accuracy levels computed from the Group Bourdon test. The models achieved above-chance predictive performance in both 2D and VR settings despite visually complex 3D stimuli. We also explored further relationships between task performance, personality traits and attention characteristics.