Eye movement research methods

The eye is window to the soul. This familiar proverb is (according to a recent Google search) variously attributable to a number of unverifiable sources. (The Bible, at least, can be ruled out, along with Shakespeare.) A more concrete earliest reference to a description of eye movements comes to us via Carpenter (1977, p. 1), who directs our attention to the 1599 work of Andreas Laurentius: If the eye stoode fast, and immoveable, we should be constrained to turne our head and necke (being all of one peece) for to see: but by these muscles it now moveth it selfe with such swiftnes and nimblenes, without stirring of the head, as is almost incredible . . . - Acquisition of data in specific performance situations is the topic of the next four papers: the automated acquisition of eye-tracking data from the general population (Wooding et al.) and the reduction and presentation of the large corpus of data that resulted (Wooding); eye movement patterns during automobile driving with secondary tasks (Sodhi, Reimer, & Llamazares); and scanpaths during Web viewing (Josephson & Holmes). Technically innovative papers describe the high-speed tracking of eye movements (including torsional rotation), either by using CMOS sensors (Clarke et al.) or by using a laser scanner (Irie et al.); Duchowski et al. describe the use of eye tracking in 3-dimensional virtual environments. Several papers address the technical challenges of experimentation and data reduction. They include methodological techniques to help maintain equipment calibration during experiments (Hornof & Halverson); MATLAB routines both for the postexperimental processing of eye-tracking data (Gitelman) and for real-time data acquisition using the Psychophysics Toolbox (Cornelissen et al.); and an algorithm for measuring the curvature of saccade trajectories (Ludwig & Gilchrist). Finally, Hartnegg and Fischer describe an apparatus for the convenient evaluation of oculomotor function in clinical diagnosis. I am grateful to all the authors for sharing their work with BRMIC, and trust that the papers collected here will prove to be useful to the many researchers interested in the movements of the eyes. (...truncated)