The active eye: Perspectives on eye movement research

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.

In this brief overview, we take a glimpse at some of the emerging areas of study in eye movement research. To do so comprehensively and in a manner that reflects the impressive breadth of work contained in this volume would be a task that is both beyond the expertise of the authors and beyond the length of the chapter that we have been asked to write. Instead, we choose to introduce some emerging areas (with a clear bias towards our own research interests) that we feel will play an increasingly important role in shaping the direction that eye movement research will take over the coming years. A number of articles have reviewed eye movement research from particular perspectives and we refer the reader to several key reviews of eye movement research. Kowler (2011) provides a review of a wide variety of findings in eye movement research over the last 25 years or so. For a review of the link between eye movements and perception, see Schutz et al. (2011). Eckstein (2011) discusses contemporary and historical views on visual search and the roles that eye movements play in this process. While slightly earlier than the other reviews, Rayner (1998) offers an important overview of eye movements in reading. In this chapter, we focus upon the link between eye movements, perception and action.