Paradigm

An incomplete sentence is shown to the participant, for example “La rue (…) parceque (…)” [  The street (…) because (…)  ]
The subject writes a complete sentence, based on the provided onset.
Then, a second incomplete sentence is displayed. The subject is to write a second complete sentence, coherent with the first one(on the red lines).

Device
The subject writes on a Wacom Cintiq 18 SX LCD tablet

Goal

The point is to manipulate the semantic distance between the two words (car/street vs. car/school) and word frequency.

When the subject is finished, he “click” with the pencil on the “fin” [end] zone.

Paradigm
In this experiment (Plane, S., Alamargot, D. & Chesnet, D., 2005), a professionnal writer is asked to resume a text.
Devices
The subject wears an Eyelink2 eyetracker (headmounted), which allows to record her eye movements while reading the incipit and while writing her own text.

She wrote on an LCD tablet, which allows to read the text incipit while writing on a single surface, which is also convenient way to manage the eyetracking device data.

As one may see, the pen “trace” is drawn on the display.

A closer view …

This was our first experiment.
It serves as a workbench to “fine tune” the Eye and Pen software. The experiment was realized by Denis Alamargot (2001).

Paradigm
The participants were asked:
– first to assemble a model of a turbine (a toy for children)
– and next, to write a guidlines for a novice user.

Devices
The production support (a (sheet of paper) shows pictures of the parts of the engine (and their names) and some intermediate stages of assembly.

Below you can see our first eyetracker (Eyeputer, fixed head monocular, modified to include a “bite bar”; sampling rate: 480 Hz) and an A4+ digitizer (34×34 cm).

The device looks a bit terrible, but the participant’s position was setup to be as comfortable as possible.

The experiment described hereafter took place at IUFM Poitou-Charentes -now INSPE (university institute for teacher training) with future school teachers ( in a computer classroom) and was managed by Denis Alamargot and Eric Lambert (2007).

Shortly said, the experiment consisted in hearing unattended speech while writing sentences. The experiment was in an auto-presentation mode, the subject triggered himself the items presentation (parameters were controlled through an Eye and Pen script).

Devices used were: an A4 format tablet, a laptop computer, audio headphones and … Eye and Pen.

Desktop units (visible on desk) wasn’t used used computers, but as “separators” to isolate subjects !

As you may see on the “zoomed in” area of the picture, subjects wrote on multi-sheet of paper booklets laid on the tablet.

This experiment was made through individual passation with schoolars by Pascale Wakanumune and Emilie Fleury (2007 ; supervised by Denis Alamargot).

Eye and Pen was used a tool to get retrospective verbalisations about the subject’s own writing processes. After the production stage, the writing “movie” was shown to the subject (like one would do with a videotape recorder), stopping on the longer writing pauses.

Mental rotations and spatial cognition : comparing vision and touch (André Caissie, 2008).

This experiment examined the differences between vision and touch when subjects are submitted to a classical visuo-spatial task of mental rotations (MRT; Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978). For this purpose, visual stimuli were used, and its physical replica, using physical three-dimensional geometrical figures as tactile stimuli.

Eye and Pen was involved for the visual selection task. Eye movements were recorded to get insight into the visual strategies of subject. The item choosen was circled with the pen.

This experiment (Sylvie Petibou and Lucie Magnien, 2007; supervised by Denis Alamargot), aims at the temporal analysis of deaf children’s written production. A second goal is to evaluate the impact of working memory. This experiment follows a first one:

Alamargot D., Lambert, E., THEBAULT, C. & Dansac C. (2007). Text composition by deaf and hearing middle-school students: The role of working memory. Reading and Writing, 20(4), 333-360. Springer: Netherlands. [DOI 10.1007/s11145-006-9033-y]

The experiment procedure was controlled by an Eye and Pen script.

The instruction was given (in french sign language) in a video file display (experimenter’s face is masked for public diffusion).

The following picture shows the display of a stimulus (a matrix to keep in memory).

and then writing down…

Using NetSync to manage group, we recorded handwriting in classrooms. [ Granted project. 4 min. video ]