Move beyond behavioral targeting: using mouse movements to read visitor’s mind

It's funny because that paper and our blog post cite the same Google paper. There's some level of interpretation of data, but some of his cited papers offer strong evidence contrary to his point.

From the Jeff Huang paper:

   The mean Euclidean distance between cursor and gaze is 178px 
   (σ = 139px) and the median is 143px.

The problem here is that there's a long tail of completely inaccurate data: the average distance between eye and mouse is 178px. I believe there are some people who tend to follow their eyes with their mouse, and some people who don't. Google research suggests the ratio is about 1:2.

That being said, I am a bit off topic here: there is most definitely value that can be extracted from mouse position. Can it be used to tell where the user is looking? Unlikely in the common case. Can it indicate purchase intent? I wouldn't be surprised.

My rebuttal was mostly premeditated by the amount of false interpretation of research about mouse-eye correlation. There's a lot of really good research out there, but it's often mis-cited to support an opposing claim.

Please make these an independent post?!