Eye Tracking Evaluating the Impact of Gesturing during Televised Weather Forecasts

The use of eye tracking technology, coupled with analyses of prior participant knowledge and weather experience surveys, gives insight into weathercast viewer attention on specific areas of televised forecasts, as well as what information participants find most useful when making decisions based on weather information. Two variations of a typical weather forecast, the Gesture and No Gesture conditions, were viewed by different participants during the eye tracking experiment. The weather forecast presented graphical information indicating the daily high and low temperature as well as future weather conditions for a seven-day period. The eye tracking data collected in this study included both the location and time of each participant's apparent focus while they viewed the weathercast. The data collected during the eye tracking experiment were analyzed quantitatively. Geographic Information System (GIS) technology was used to aggregate and overlay each participants' gaze data on still images representative of each weathercast condition. This study indicates that gesturing impacts weathercast viewer attention during weekend weather forecasts.