In what ways do eye movements contribute to everyday activities?

By M. Land, Mary M. Hayhoe. 2001

981 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Two recent studies have investigated the relations of eye and hand movements in extended food preparation tasks, and here the results are compared. The tasks could be divided into a series of actions performed on objects. The eyes usually reached the next object in the sequence before any sign of manipulative action, indicating that eye movements are planned into the motor pattern and lead each action. The eyes usually fixated the same object throughout the action upon it, although they often moved on to the next object in the sequence before completion of the preceding action. The specific roles of individual fixations could be identified as locating (establishing the locations of objects for future use), directing (establishing target direction prior to contact), guiding (supervising the relative movements of two or three objects) and checking (establishing whether some particular condition is met, prior to the termination of an action). It is argued that, at the beginning of each action, the oculomotor system is supplied with the identity of the required object, information about its location, and instructions about the nature of the monitoring required during the action. The eye movements during this kind of task are nearly all to task-relevant objects, and thus their control is seen as primarily 'top-down', and influenced very little by the 'intrinsic salience' of objects.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Human-Computer Interaction, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Delving into Egocentric Actions (2015, neutral): “Gaze points often lie on objects that are relevant to the task we are performing, since gaze is used to coordinate actions [18].”
Constraints on the search for visual information in sport (2004, background): “The assumption is that the knowledge-based map is more important than the visual saliency map during scene perception in “real-world” situations as personified by dynamic sport tasks (Land & Hayhoe, 2001).”
Clustering of Gaze During Dynamic Scene Viewing is Predicted by Motion (2011, background): “control becomes even more pronounced as gaze is tightly linked to the completion of goals such as steering a car, filling a kettle, or walking down the street [36–39].”
Reinforcement learning, efficient coding, and the statistics of natural tasks (2015, background): “A clear illustration comes from gaze- and motion-tracking work by Land, Hayhoe and colleagues [62,63], which has revealed strong regularities in patterns of visual fixation and eye–hand coordination during naturalistic action.”
Visual search: a retrospective. (2011, background): “…eye movements and object localizations also anticipate motor actions: grabbing one’s coffee cup and placing a key to open a door or start the car are all preceded by a quick ﬁxation on the object (Figure 1a; Hayhoe & Ballard, 2005; Land, 2009; Land & Hayhoe, 2001; Mennie, Hayhoe, & Sullivan, 2007).”
Task and context determine where you look. (2016, background): “These effects become even more prominent in tasks that are not based on picture viewing but study subjects actively involved in interacting with the environment when executing goal-directed behavior (Land & Hayhoe, 2001).”
Two forms of scene memory guide visual search: Memory for scene context and memory for the binding of target object to scene location (2009, background): “For example, when cooking a meal, one must search for many of the items (ingredients, utensils) that are necessary to complete the task (Land & Hayhoe, 2001 ).”
The 35th Sir Frederick Bartlett Lecture: Eye movements and attention in reading, scene perception, and visual search (2009, positive): “…there has been considerable interest in “real-world” or “natural” tasks (Hayhoe & Ballard, 2005; Hayhoe, Shrivastava, Mruczek, & Pelz, 2007; Land & Hayhoe, 2001) and in a paradigm called the visual-world paradigm (Altmann, 2004; Altmann & Kamide, 1999; Spivey, Tanenhaus, Eberhard, &…”
Visual correlates of fixation selection: effects of scale and time. (2005, background): “Indeed, it is clear that during activities of daily life there are large proportions of the visual surroundings that we do not direct our eyes toward (e.g. Ballard et al., 1992; Land & Hayhoe, 2001; Land, Mennie, & Rusted, 1999).”
I See What You See: Integrating Eye Tracking into Hanabi Playing Agents (2018, background): “Humans often give non-verbal cues to indicate their intentions (Land and Hayhoe 2001) or augment their verbal communication, often subconsciously.”
Eye movements in natural behavior. (2005, neutral): “[7,9,33,34].”