Your eyes never stop moving.

October 24, 2001 7:43 AM

Your eyes never stop moving. Even though we are rarely aware of them, our eye movements are incredibly complex. They are also very informative. Eye movement data is being used to study painters painting, art lovers loving art, drivers driving, musicians sight reading, and speakers speaking, not to mention the cognitive science staples of reading and scene viewing. One interesting application of eye movement data is the Eyetrack2000 project, which attempts to describe the eye movement behavior of people viewing news websites in order to improve web page design. Some of the findings suggest that the internet and print media are different in important ways: on the web, text is fixated before pictures; in print, pictures are fixated first.
posted by iceberg273 (10 comments total)

If you are interesed in the physiology of eye movments, the UC Davis School of Medicine has an Eye Movement Simulator. For further reading on visual perception, try The Joy of Visual Perception, an online introductory text.
posted by iceberg273 at 7:48 AM on October 24, 2001

There goes my evening, nice links iceberg, thanks
posted by iain at 8:28 AM on October 24, 2001

from Soul Coughing:

"The camera man sways /
to remember how the eye dances"
posted by SpecialK at 8:35 AM on October 24, 2001

Excellent links iceberg. Good job. Thanks
posted by adnanbwp at 8:37 AM on October 24, 2001

all i know is that after staring at the first link for 5 mins (hypnotized) i can now only see that where ever i look - great links
posted by monkeyJuice at 9:07 AM on October 24, 2001

I'm trying to dig into the Eyetrack study to determine their methods, but I have a prelimary comment, which is: most newspapers are laid out the same way, but most news sites are not. Is that a correct statement?
posted by girlhacker at 10:39 AM on October 24, 2001

Mmm... it's edulicious!
posted by delmoi at 10:50 AM on October 24, 2001

rock n roll iceberg!

i am curious what these will have to say about lens-wearers vs. non-lens-wearers. aldous huxley and william bates both wrote books about the improvement of vision through returning mobility to the eyes.
posted by gomez at 5:04 PM on October 24, 2001

I actually went to the exhibit at the National Gallery in London. The painting they were tracking was one of Van Gogh's Sunflowers. It was really interesting that most people's glances followed a set pattern starting with the middle flower 3/4 of the way up. But there were also lots of people whose gaze went straight to the artist's name to make sure it was something famous enough to be worth their while, which is kind of sad. There was also a huge screen with a movie of an eye blinking on continuous loop that was freaky.
posted by bluefly at 6:56 PM on October 24, 2001

My eyes/brain are so susceptible to the lure of cable-news TV "crawls" that I've had to put a strip of duct tape across the bottom of the screen!
posted by Carol Anne at 6:23 AM on October 25, 2001