Configure Text Interest Areas

Enter study-level parameters

Open EyeSort → 2. Setup Interest Areas → Text-Based Sentence Contents and Interest Areas. Select the tab-delimited IA file, then enter:

• reading direction;
• sentence X offset and pixels per character;
• region count and comma-separated region names in display order;
• descriptive condition column(s), numeric condition column, and numeric item column;
• trial start/end codes and optional stimulus-window codes;
• condition and item trigger lists;
• fixation/saccade event names and X fields.

Item ranges such as S1:S112 are expanded. Placeholder numbers in the GUI are examples, not measurements for your study.

Save and process

Use Save Configuration to create a study-owned .mat file. Save Intermediate Dataset(s) is optional and produces <base>_eyesort_ia.set/.fdt after mapping. Click Confirm to run trigger validation, boundary assignment, and trial labeling.

EyeSort also caches the latest settings in cache/last_text_ia_config.mat; treat that as convenience state only.

Expected result

EEG.eyesort_processed is true, EEG.region_names contains the ordered names, and fixation events have fields such as current_region, region_pass_number, fixation_in_pass, and current_word_text.

Verify:

assert(EEG.eyesort_processed)
EEG.region_names
EEG.eyesort_step2_diagnostics
assigned = ~cellfun(@isempty, {EEG.event.current_region});
nnz(assigned)

A successful function call is not enough: inspect diagnostics and parsed regions before labeling.