Don't Wanna Miss a Thing

Fig 1. System Pipeline Overview

An overview of the gaze-aware interventions during video-viewing in non-native languages. (Pause) Playback is paused to prevent content loss. (Stack Subtitles) Subtitles are stacked to allow catch-up reading. (Audio Dubbing) Audio dubbing provides catch-up narration.

Abstract

Watching subtitled videos in a foreign language demands sustained visual attention, which can put viewers at risk of missing content due to distraction, such as checking notifications. In this work, we introduced a gaze-aware video player that adapts playback to support attention recovery. We evaluated three gaze-aware techniques: adaptive pausing, stacked subtitles, and audio language switching (dubbing). In a comparative study with 24 participants, we evaluated these techniques against a standard video player with subtitles. While adaptive pausing improved task performance and reduced distractions, stacked subtitles helped recover reading but occasionally slowed faster readers. The benefit of dubbing was limited, resulting in additional cognitive load during the process. Ultimately, all gaze-aware interventions outperformed the standard video player. This work highlights gaze-adaptive systems that seamlessly support attention recovery into everyday viewing experiences.

System Behaviors

Three Implicit Interventions Triggered by Attention Loss.

01 // Intervention

Pausing

Playback pauses the exact moment your gaze leaves the screen. It seamlessly resumes the moment your gaze returns. You miss nothing, and require no manual scrubbing.

02 // Intervention

Subtitle Stacking

Subtitles persist and layer on top of one another if the system detects subtitles have not been read. Once the maximum stack is reached, the system pauses to allow catch-up.

03 // Intervention

Audio Dubbing

Instead of halting playback, the audio invisibly cuts to an English text-to-speech dub when you look away, shifting comprehension from visual reading to auditory listening.

Empirical Data

Gaze-Aware Interventions Outperform the Standard Player.

We conducted a within-subjects user study with 24 participants to evaluate the three gaze-aware interventions against a standard playback baseline. Condition viewing orders were counterbalanced to minimize learning effects. Viewer success was measured using continuous eye-tracking logs, performance on an asynchronous mobile distractor task, and post-task video comprehension quizzes.

Content Comprehension

Post-study performance showed that viewers managed to score similarly in content comprehension tests across all systems. Although comprehension was not statistically improved over the standard video player, viewers nonetheless preferred the gaze-aware interventions to maintain that parity under distraction.

Fig 2. Content Comprehension

Distractor Task Performance

Pausing the video proved the most effective technique for mitigating distractions, yielding the highest scores (98%) on distractor questions. Participants spent comparable durations responding to the distractors across all methods.

Fig 3. Distractor Task Results

Gaze Offloading

Eye-tracking analysis confirmed that implicit interventions reduce visual demand. Pausing reduced off-screen checks down to 5.4%, compared to 27.6% in a standard workflow.

Fig 4. Gaze Offloading

Performance & Preferences

Viewers heavily favored Pausing. Stacking and Dubbing emerged as intermediate techniques for balancing cognitive load, while the standard video player reliably performed the worst across recovery metrics.

Fig 5. Survey Results

Discussion

Balancing Gaze-Aware Adaptation with Cognitive Load.

Real-Time Recovery

Gaze-adaptive interventions effectively help viewers disengage during distractions without the cognitive burden of monitoring the video. While they keep viewers temporally synchronized during immediate attention lapses, this short-term access does not automatically bridge the gap to long-term conceptual learning or memory.

Modality & Cognitive Load

Abrupt modality transitions (like audio dubbing) can overload working memory for non-fluent viewers managing dual-language processing. While stacking maintains visual context by keeping viewers engaged, strict pausing is most effective at offloading attentional demands.

Aligning with Viewer Behavior

Fixed thresholds for interventions often misalign with natural reading speeds, sometimes triggering unnecessary disruptions during normal viewing. A seamless experience requires lightweight calibration and adjustable features so interventions feel like a natural extension of viewing behavior.

Ongoing Research

Future Works & Limitations.

Contextual Translation

Currently tested in a controlled environment with short videos, future research will investigate how gaze-adaptive recovery translates to extended viewing sessions, multitasking contexts, and varied device formats like mobile viewing.

Multi-Viewer Resilience

While designed for a single viewer, scaling interventions—such as transitioning to AI summaries or pushing catch-up notifications to a personal mobile device—can preserve seamless playback for others in shared-screen environments.

Cross-linguistic Studies

Because our participant sample primarily consisted of viewers who were non-fluent in Spanish/Italian but fluent in English, further evaluations across diverse language pairings are essential to determine how recovery techniques generalize.

The Team

Authors

Mohammed Ahmed

Researcher, MSc

Ontario Tech University

Benedict Leung

Researcher, MSc

Ontario Tech University

Mariana Shimabukuro

Researcher, Associate Professor

Ontario Tech University

Christopher Collins

Professor

Ontario Tech University

Citation

Cite our work

@inproceedings{ahmed2026dontwannamissathing,
    author={Mohammed Ahmed and Benedict Leung and Mariana Shimabukuro and Christopher Collins},
    title={Don't Wanna Miss a Thing: Gaze-Aware Implicit Interventions for Distraction Recovery in Foreign-Language Videos},
    year={2026},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    url = {https://doi.org/xxxxxxxxxx},
    doi = {10.1145/xxxxxxxxxx},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the 2026 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications},
    series={ETRA '26},
}

Ahmed, M., Leung, B., Shimabukuro, M., & Collins, C. (2026). Don't Wanna Miss a Thing: Gaze-Aware Implicit Interventions for Distraction Recovery in Foreign-Language Videos. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications. ACM.