skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Examining Fitts’ and FFitts’ Law Models for Children’s Pointing Tasks on Touchscreens
Fitts’ law has accurately modeled both children’s and adults’ pointing movements, but it is not as precise for modeling movement to small targets. To address this issue, prior work presented FFitts’ law, which is more exact than Fitts’ law for modeling adults’ finger input on touchscreens. Since children’s touch interactions are more variable than adults, it is unclear if FFitts’ law should be applied to children. We conducted a 2D target acquisition task with 54 children (ages 5-10) to examine if FFitts’ law can accurately model children’s touchscreen movement time. We found that Fitts’ law using nominal target widths is more accurate, with a R2 value of 0.93, than FFitts’ law for modeling children’s finger input on touchscreens. Our work contributes new understanding of how to accurately predict children’s finger touch performance on touchscreens.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1750840
PAR ID:
10175145
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Finger-Fitts law [6] is a variant of Fitts’ law which accounts for the finger ambiguity in touch pointing. In this paper we investigated two research questions related to Finger-Fitts law: (1) Should Finger-Fitts law use nominal target width W or effect target width We to model MT? and (2) should Finger-Fitts law use a pre-defined value (denoted by σa) or a free parameter (denoted by c) to represent the absolute ambiguity caused by finger touch? Our investigation on two touch pointing datasets showed that there are cases where using nominal width has stronger model fitness, and also cases where using effective width is better. Regarding the representation of finger ambiguity, using a free parameter c to represent the ambiguity of finger touch always leads to stronger model fitness than using the pre-defined σa, after controlling for overfitting. It indicates that viewing the finger ambiguity as an empirically determined parameter has more flexibility to capture the ambiguity of finger touch involved in the study. Overall, our research advances the understanding on how to model Finger touch input with Finger-Fitts law. 
    more » « less
  2. To understand whether people can identify their optimal touchscreen target sizes, we asked older and younger adults to identify optimal target sizes on a questionnaire and com-pared these chosen sizes to performance on a target acquisi-tion task. We found that older individuals (60+) were better than younger adults at choosing their optimal target sizes. In fact, younger adults underestimated the smallest target size they could accurately touch by almost 6mm. This study sug-gests that older adults may be able to better configure target size settings than younger adults. 
    more » « less
  3. How do children’s representations of object categories change as they grow older? As they learn about the world around them, they also express what they know in the drawings they make. Here, we examine drawings as a window into how children represent familiar object categories, and how this changes across childhood. We asked children (age 3-10 years) to draw familiar object categories on an iPad. First, we analyzed their semantic content, finding large and consistent gains in how well children could produce drawings that are recognizable to adults. Second, we quantified their perceptual similarity to adult drawings using a pre-trained deep convolutional neural network, allowing us to visualize the representational layout of object categories across age groups using a common feature basis. We found that the organization of object categories in older children’s drawings were more similar to that of adults than younger children’s drawings. This correspondence was strong in the final layers of the neural network, showing that older children’s drawings tend to capture the perceptual features critical for adult recognition. We hypothesize that this improvement reflects increasing convergence between children’s representations of object categories and that of adults; future work will examine how these age-related changes relate to children’s developing perceptual and motor capacities. Broadly, these findings point to drawing as a rich source of insight into how children represent object concepts. 
    more » « less
  4. We compared everyday language input to young congenitally-blind children with no addi- tional disabilities (N=15, 6–30 mo., M:16 mo.) and demographically-matched sighted peers (N=15, 6–31 mo., M:16 mo.). By studying whether the language input of blind children differs from their sighted peers, we aimed to determine whether, in principle, the language acquisition patterns observed in blind and sighted children could be explained by aspects of the speech they hear. Children wore LENA recorders to capture the auditory language environment in their homes. Speech in these recordings was then analyzed with a mix of automated and manually-transcribed measures across various subsets and dimensions of language input. These included measures of quantity (adult words), interaction (conversational turns and child-directed speech), linguistic properties (lexical diversity and mean length of utterance), and conceptual features (talk centered around the here-and-now; talk focused on visual referents that would be inaccessible to the blind but not sighted children). Overall, we found broad similarity across groups in speech quantitative, interactive, and linguistic properties. The only exception was that blind children’s language environments contained slightly but significantly more talk about past/future/hypothetical events than sighted children’s input; both groups received equiva- lent quantities of “visual” speech input. The findings challenge the notion that blind children’s lan- guage input diverges substantially from sighted children’s; while the input is highly variable across children, it is not systematically so across groups, across nearly all measures. The findings suggest instead that blind children and sighted children alike receive input that readily supports their language development, with open questions remaining regarding how this input may be differentially leveraged by language learners in early childhood. 
    more » « less
  5. Young children tend to prioritize objects over layouts in their drawings, often juxtaposing “floating” objects in the picture plane instead of grounding those objects in drawn representations of the extended layout. In the present study, we explore whether implicitly directing children’s attention to elements of the extended layout through a drawing’s communicative goal—to indicate the location of a hidden target to someone else—might lead children to draw more layout information. By comparing children’s drawings to a different group of children’s verbal descriptions, moreover, we explore how communicative medium affects children’s inclusion of layout and object information. If attention modulates children’s symbolic communication about layouts and objects, then children should both draw and talk about layouts and objects when they are relevant to the communicative task. If there are challenges or advantages specific to either medium, then children might treat layouts and objects differently when drawing versus describing them. We find evidence for both of these possibilities: Attention affects what children include in symbolic communication, like drawings and language, but children are more concise in their inclusion of relevant layout or object information in language versus drawings. 
    more » « less