Analysis of the Relationship between Subjective Difficulty of a Task and the Efforts Put into It using Biometric Information

This paper proposes a novel method for analyzing the relationships between the difficulty of tasks and the effort of learners to accomplish them using biometric information. The biometric information we adopted was as follows: 1) pupil diameter variation for estimating subjective task difficulty, and 2) eye movements indicative of answer selection times for assessing subjective efforts and strategies to solve the problems. The data used in this study are eye movement data obtained in a different study for studying brain activities during arithmetic calculations in terms of electroencephalography (EEG) data (Suzuki et al., 2021). This study reanalyzed the eye movement data by introducing the following two variables: 1) the duration times in the characteristic areas for solving the tasks to understand how the participants strategically retrieved the task information, and 2) the changes in the sizes of pupil diameter to understand the levels of engagement of the participants while solving the tasks. This study suggests that the relationships found in these variables should characterize the participants' learning attitudes and could be related to confidence and satisfaction in the attention-relevance-confidence-satisfaction (ARCS) model, indicating the possibility of applying the results to educational systems.