Eye movements: The past 25years

Abstract

This article reviews the past 25 of research on eye movements (1986–2011). Emphasis is on three oculomotor behaviors: gaze control, smooth pursuit and saccades, and on their interactions with vision. Focus over the past 25 years has remained on the fundamental and classical questions: What are the mechanisms that keep gaze stable with either stationary or moving targets? How does the motion of the image on the retina affect vision? Where do we look – and why – when performing a complex task? How can the world appear clear and stable despite continual movements of the eyes? The past 25 years of investigation of these questions has seen progress and transformations at all levels due to new approaches (behavioral, neural and theoretical) aimed at studying how eye movements cope with real-world visual and cognitive demands. The work has led to a better understanding of how prediction, learning and attention work with sensory signals to contribute to the effective operation of eye movements in visually rich environments.

Is human classification by experienced untrained observers a gold standard in fixation detection?

“…3, the question of whether the classifications of a dozen coders agree can be answered with a simple Bno.^The intercoder fixation duration differences are larger than most fixation duration differences that may occur between very different experimental conditions (Kowler, 2011;Rayner, 1998). In addition, Figs.…”

Effects of saccadic eye movements on postural control stabilization

“…Although these fixations were not recorded, their duration supposedly varied according to the saccadic frequency condition. The efferent mechanism (particularly, efference copy) actuates by attenuating body sway in an attempt to connect pre-saccadic and post-saccadic views of the scene (Kowler, 2011), which favors the spatial accuracy of the saccade with respect to the target location. This mechanism could explain the main effect of gaze condition in the present study, but not the gaze by stance interaction.…”

Actes du Symposium international sur la litéracie à l’école = International Symposium for Educational Literacy (SILE/ISEL)

“…As the name implies, fixations are ocular activities consisting in setting one's eyes on a particular location, so that the desired word falls on the high-acuity area of the retina called the fovea (Kowler, 2011). In this way, during each successive fixation, visual information on the orthography of a word is retrieved, so that the word can be lexically identified to achieve sentence comprehension.…”