Area of Interest

A defined region within a visual stimulus (such as a screen, webpage, or video frame) that researchers designate for analysis in an eye-tracking study. AOIs allow researchers to quantify how much visual attention participants direct toward specific elements — for example, the speaker's face, captions, or a news ticker in a television broadcast. Metrics such as proportional fixation time, fixation count, and dwell time are calculated for each AOI to determine the relative importance of different content regions to viewers.