Benjamin W. Tatler

Successfully completing many forms of behaviour requires that humans look in the right place at the right time: This has generated a large volume of research aimed at understanding how the eyes are guided. This special issue demonstrates that the decision about where to look involves a large number of factors from low- to high-level constraints. New models of eye guidance are presented, and these offer converging approaches to understanding how we inspect complex scenes. Importantly, this special issue brings together evidence from a range of settings - from static scene viewing to real world environments - in order to fully assess our current understanding of eye guidance in natural scenes.

A Special Issue of Visual Cognition

Eye Guidance in Natural Scenes

Nicholas Wade

Professor of Visual Psychology Nicholas Wade

Lecturer in Psychology Benjamin Tatler

Eye movements are a vital part of our interaction with the world. They play a pivotal role in perception, cognition, and education. Research in this field is now proceeding at a considerable pace and casting new light on how the eyes move and what information we can derive during the frequentand brief periods of fixation. However, the origins of this work are less well known, even though much of our knowledge was derived from this research with far more primitive equipment. This book is unique in tracing the history of eye movement research. It shows how great strides were made in this area before modern recording devices were available, especially in the measurement of nystagmus. When photographic techniques were adapted to measure discontinuous eye movements, fromabout 1900, many of the issues that are now basic to modern research were then investigated. One of the earliest cognitive tasks examined was reading, and it remains in the vanguard of contemporary research. Modern researchers in this field will be astonished at the subtleties of these early experimental studies and the ingenuity of interpretations that were advanced one and even two centuries ago. Though physicians often carried out the original eye movement research, later on it was pursued bypsychologists - it is within contemporary neuroscience that we find these two strands reunited. Anyone interested in the origins of psychology and neuroscience will find much to stimulate and surprise them in this valuable new work.

Benjamin W. Tatler

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