21.06.2018

Best Early Investigator Award

Tobias Appel, Christian Scharinger, Peter Gerjets and Enkelejda Kasneci were awarded for new methods of cognitive load measurement based on pupil size changes

On June 15, Tobias Appel, Christian Scharinger, Peter Gerjets and Enkelejda Kasneci received the award "Best Early Investigator Paper" for their conference contribution "Cross-subject workload classification using pupil-related measures" at the ETRA 2018 (ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications). In their contribution, they presented a novel method for detecting cognitive load from pupil size changes. This new approach generalizes better than established methods and is able to determine cognitive load in real time during an experiment due to the use of machine learning. There are many possible applications of this approach in educational contexts. For example, it can be used to automatically adjust the difficulty of a learning task so that learners are neither under- nor over-challenged.

The award was granted in Warsaw after the contribution was selected out of 84 other early investigator papers. The contribution resulted from a cooperation between the LEAD Graduate School and research network, the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) and the Perception Engineering Group of the University of Tübingen. It can be considered a prototypical example of the successful interplay of experimental psychology, computer science, and applications in educational research.