Rules and Guidelines for Manual Classification of Fixations, Saccades, PSEs and Other Events in High Quality Eye Movement Recordings During Reading

We present a set of detailed scoring rules and the design of a scoring interface for the purpose of classifying eye-movements during reading. The recordings we employed were from the EyeLink 1000 and were collected at 1000 Hz. The subjects were reading a poem during eye movement recording. The rules and interface design emerged from a series of 20 consensus discussions between 3 graduate students and 1 faculty-level person with much experience studying eye movements. The discussions lasted, on average, 2.14 hours each. From 1-5 pilot classification attempts, made by the first four authors above, were performed between discussions. The events classified included saccades, post-saccade events (PSE), various artifacts, and by default, fixation. The rules are described in detail, with many illustrations. We are not aware of any other comparably detailed publicly available set of eye movement classification rules.