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Academic researchĮye tracking began in 1908 when Edmund Huey built a device in his lab to study how people read. Below, we explore some important examples of current applications of eye tracking. The answers to questions such as these are relevant to many different fields. With eye tracking it is possible to answer fundamental questions about human behavior: What is this person interested in? What are they looking at? What are they feeling? What do their eyes tell us about their health, or their coordination, or their alertness? The scope and possibilities of eye tracking are huge, and continue to expand as novel applications are created and developed. Given the insights that eye tracking offers, it’s no surprise that it has been applied to many different areas of research and industry (Duchowski, 2002). Therefore, by analyzing eye movements alone or in relation to the visual scene in front of them, important insights can be gained into behaviors and mental states. The visual information from the fovea has a powerful influence on a person’s cognitive, emotional, physiological, and neurological states. This means that the detail taken in by the foveal “spotlight” depends on the locations and durations of fixations and smooth pursuits in the visual scene. Importantly, this information is only processed by the brain during periods of fixation or smooth pursuit, and not during saccades. This pattern of eye movements makes best use of the limited focus of foveal vision to quickly gather detailed visual information.
#Eye tracking data analysis series
When people visually investigate a scene, they make a series of rapid saccades, interspersed with relatively longer periods of fixations on its key features, or smooth pursuits of moving objects. Saccades are rapid, point-to-point eye movements that shift the focus of the eyes abruptly (typically in 20–100 ms) to a new fixation point, while smooth pursuits are continuous movements of the eye to track a moving object. Smooth pursuits and saccades are types of proper eye movement. They make use of the high resolution of the fovea to maximize the visual information gained about the focal object. In contrast to the typically rapid movements of the eyes, fixations are relatively longer periods (0.2–0.6 s) of steady focus on an object. How are eye movements classified?Įye movements can be classified into three discrete movement motifs: fixations, saccades, and smooth pursuits ( Rayner & Castelhano, 2007 Findlay & Walker, 2012). While saccades (left animation) refer to rapid jumps in gaze from fixation to fixation, during smooth pursuits (right animation) gaze follows a moving object in a continuous manner.
#Eye tracking data analysis full
It contains two types of photoreceptor cells: cones, which provide high-resolution color vision and rods, which are responsible for low-resolution monochromatic vision (Dowling, 2007).Ĭones are packed at the highest density within an extremely small, specialized area known as the fovea, which covers a mere 2° around the focal point of each eye (roughly the width of your thumbnail if you hold your arm at full length away from you).įigure 2: Qualitatively different eye movement motifs can be distinguished. How does the anatomy of the eye relate to eye movements?Īt the back of the human eye is a light-sensitive sheet of cells called the retina. To put these in context, it’s helpful to first explore the anatomy of the eye itself. Let’s start with a seemingly simple question: Why do we move our eyes in the first place? The answers to this question are crucial for understanding why eye movements are so informative about our behaviors and mental states.Īs humans, we move our eyes in very specific ways, known as “movement motifs”. It is a versatile approach to answering a range of fundamental questions, such as: What is this person feeling? What are they interested in? How distracted or drowsy are they? What is their state of mental or physical health? Why and how do we move our eyes? By analyzing these signals, either in isolation or in relation to the visual scene, important insights can be gained into human behaviors and mental states. As the proverbial “windows to the soul”, our eyes are a rich source of information about our internal world.Įye tracking is a powerful method for collecting eye-related signals, such as gaze direction, pupil size, and blink rate.