“So why do artists look at pictures — especially non-abstract pictures — differently from non-artists? Vogt and Magnussen argue that it comes down to training: artists have learned to identify the real details of a picture, not just the ones that are immediately most salient to the perceptual system, which is naturally disposed to focusing on objects and faces.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“The Poynter Institute is about to launch the research phase of its run-up to launching version 4.0 of its perennially popular game, The Poynter Institute’s Complete Waste of Time. Many of you may know it by its more common name, the EyeTrack study. It’s a game where knowledge is fun! — knowledge of utterly useless, anecdotal and irresponsibly non-applicable trivia about the viewing habits of website visitors. Let’s play along.”

“This year, the Ziff Davis Smart Business Labs teamed up with eyeTracking.com to find out which sites make it easiest and fastest to find what you’re looking for, get questions answered, and complete and track your order. We chose two leading companies in the hottest e-commerce categories and pitted them against one another in our exhaustive tests.”

“A website that can read your body language and know what you want before you have even clicked on anything may sound like science fiction… A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, US, say they have developed a way to record mouse movements on a page and learn how people behave when they are on the internet.”

“Using eye movements as a user-to-computer communication medium can help redress this imbalance. This chapter describes the relevant characteristics of the human eye, eye tracking technology, how to design interaction techniques that incorporate eye movements into the user-computer dialogue in a convenient and natural way, and the relationship between eye movement interfaces and virtual environments.”This is a new xBlog category as of today.

An interview with cognitive psychologist Dr. Albrecht Inhoff: “There is converging evidence — at least from the area of reading research — that the planning of saccades and the duration of fixations that intervene between successive saccades are determined by on-line computations. The duration of fixation durations, in particular, has been linked to the ease of a wide range of ongoing cognitive computations.”

“Our emphasis is on the study of interaction techniques that incorporate eye movements into the user-computer dialogue in a convenient and natural way. This chapter describes research at NRL on developing such interaction techniques and the broader issues raised by non-command-based interaction styles.”

“Text input with eye trackers can be implemented in many ways such as on-screen keyboards or context sensitive menu-selection techniques. We propose the use of off-screen targets and various schemes for decoding target hit sequences into text.”

“In May 2000, the Poynter Institute released an eyetracking study of how people read news on the Web, mainly focusing on newspaper sites. Their results confirm the findings from my previous studies in 1994 and 1997 of how users read on the Web.”

“People viewing displays often suffer from visual fatigue. By measuring how well the eye accommodates to displayed images, laser optometry has been used to test this aspect of visibility.”

The Stanford-Poynter Project, so far, the definitive eye tracking study. Controversial, but the only one of its kind ever undertaken.