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What is eye tracking?
A Tobii Eye Tracker measures how the eyes typically move over a digital imagethat is shown to a respondent from the target group. The human eyes areconstantly moving until they stop and focus on a point. There are over tendifferent types of eye movements, of which the most important ones aresaccades, fixations, and smooth pursuit. When the eyes stop to focus it is calleda fixation and the movements between these fixations are called saccades. Thelength of the stops, when the eye fixates, varies from about 100 to 600milliseconds and during this stop the brain starts to process the visualinformation received from the eyes . Saccades are extremely fast jumps from onefixation to another. The average length of a saccade is about 20-40 ms. Duringthis period the eyes do not send visual information to the brain. The human eyehas a visual field of about 200º but the highest number of light sensitive cells onthe retina are located in the part called fovea, which is the only point in our eyeswhere we are able to see a sharp and colorful image of the world around us. Thisarea is fairly small and covers only about 1 - 2 degrees of our vision (which isabout the size of a thumbnail at an arm length’s distance). It is only from thesecells our brain can receive detailed visual information. Our perception is slightlylarger than the area of foveal vision. When, for example, reading a text, we canread about 12-15 letters to the right and 3-4 letters to the left, which wouldindicate there is a perceptual span of around 18 characters centeredasymmetrically around the fixation point . Using our peripheral vision outside thearea of the foveal vision we can see an unclear image, but our peripheral visionis generally very poor and is only good at picking up movements and contrasts.It is possible to move our covert attention (the attention of our mind) around theentire visual field when our eyes are at rest. Thus it is possible to move ourattention around without eye movements. However, our foveal vision is usually avalid measure for determining the target of our covert attention as our brain canprocess very little information from complex stimuli from the area outside thefovea (such as packages on a shelf). In such cases it is more efficient for ourbrain to focus attention on the fovea rather than on our peripheral vision, as thebrain needs to process blurry visual information requiring more effort to interpretthan the visual information from the fovea. This is why it is possible to tellsomething about human behavior by just following eye movements, especiallythe fixations, as we know that we can only see something clearly when we fixateon an object or are very close to it. If a person does not fixate on, or is not veryclose to the package on a shelf, he or she would not be able to see the productand read the text on it. A Tobii Eye Tracker records these movements and thelocation of the foveal vision when the eyes fixate.By analyzing our eye movements it is possible to tell something about ourbehavior. The length of a fixation is usually an indication of informationprocessing or cognitive activities as this is when the brain interprets the visualinformation from the eyes. For example, in reading studies it has been proventhat for common words the fixation lengths are shorter than for less commonwords where the fixation lengths are longer. The amount of fixations can indicate
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