The active eye: Perspectives on eye movement research

Abstract

Many of the behaviours that humans engage in require visual information for their successful completion. In order to acquire this visual information, we point our high-resolution foveae at those locations from which information is required. The foveae are relocated to new locations around three times every second. Eye movements, therefore, offer crucial insights into understanding human behaviour for two reasons. First, the locations selected for fixation provide us with insights into the changing moment-to-moment information requirements for the behaviours we engage in. Second, despite the fact that our eyes move, on average, three or four times per second, we are unaware of this and most of the time we are not conscious of where we are pointing our eyes. Thus, eye movements provide an ideal and powerful objective measure of ongoing cognitive processes and information requirements during behaviour. The utility of eye movements for understanding aspects of human behaviour is now recognised in a wide diversity of research disciplines. Indeed, the prevalence, diversity and utility of eye movements as research tools are evident from the contributions to be found in this volume.