Chapter 1 - Eye-movement research: An overview of current and past developments

This chapter discusses some of the issues that reflect the wide diversity of eye-movement research. It provides an up-to-date impression of the most significant developments in the area, based on findings from a survey of eye-movement researchers and database searches. Recent developments include the history of eye-movement research, eye movements as a method for investigating spoken language processing, and eye movements in natural environments. The modeling of eye movements has also seen a great deal of recent change and development. Areas that have been longer established but continue to produce important new findings are physiology and clinical studies of eye movements, transsaccadic integration, eye-movements and reading, and eye movements as a method for investigating attention and scene perception. The most important developments in eye-movement research have been highlighted. The chapter considers the state of eye-movement research by reporting results from a survey sent to participants of The 12th European Conference on Eye Movements (ECEM12) and a journal database search. The chapter describes computational modeling, new eye-tracking technologies, and anatomical and physiological mapping of the visual-oculomotor system as the most important recent developments.