09.04.2024
What is eye tracking
by Thomas Jablonski, Managing Director
A general overview
Eye tracking is a technology that measures where, how long, and in what order a person looks at visual information. By recording eye movements, eye tracking helps researchers and professionals understand visual attention, perception, decision-making, and user behavior.
In simple terms, eye tracking shows what people look at, what they ignore, how they explore a scene, and how their gaze changes over time. This makes it a powerful tool in psychology, neuroscience, usability research, marketing, human-machine interaction, and many other fields.
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How does eye tracking work?
Modern eye tracking systems are typically video camera based and use infrared light for illumination to detect the position of the eye ball and pupil and, after a short calibration, it is able to map gaze position to specific locations on the screen. This allows researchers to collect precise gaze data wit hhigh sampling rates while participants view images, videos, websites, questionnaires, games, experimental tasks, or other visual queues.
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What data does eye tracking measure?
Eye tracking can provide several types of data. The direct measured and most common metrics are:
Gaze position: The location where a person is looking, often represented as x and y coordinates on a screen.
Pupil size: Changes in pupil dilation, which can be related to cognitive load, attention, emotional responses, or changes in lighting.
Eye ball position: 3D location in front of the eye tracker which can be used to understand head positioning or blinking behavior.
Fixations: Moments when the eyes remain relatively stable on one object. Fixations often indicate attention or information processing.
Saccades: Rapid eye movements between fixations. Saccades show how the eyes move from one point of interest to another.
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Why is eye tracking important?
Eye tracking is important because it provides an objective way to study visual attention. Instead of relying only on what people say they noticed, researchers can measure what they actually looked at.
This is especially useful in situations where attention happens quickly, unconsciously, or under complex conditions. Eye tracking can reveal whether users notice important information, how they navigate an interface, how they respond to visual stimuli, and where confusion or distraction occurs.
Common applications of eye tracking
Eye tracking is used in many research and professional contexts. Common applications include:
Psychology and neuroscience: Studying attention, perception, reading, memory, decision-making, emotional processing, and cognitive load.
Linguistics: Studying reading behavior, language processing, word recognition, sentence comprehension, and how visual attention changes during spoken or written language tasks.
UX and usability research: Understanding how users interact with websites, software, apps, navigation elements, forms, and call-to-action buttons.
Marketing and consumer research: Analyzing how people view advertisements, packaging, product displays, brand elements, and key messages.
Human-machine interaction: Evaluating operator attention, workload, situational awareness, and gaze-based interaction in technical systems.
Education and reading research: Investigating reading patterns, comprehension, learning behavior, regressions, and fixation durations.
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What is eye tracking analysis?
Eye tracking analysis is the process of turning raw gaze data into interpretable results. Raw data often includes thousands of gaze points collected over time. Analysis software helps organize, visualize, and calculate metrics from this data.
Typical eye tracking analysis methods include heatmaps, fixation plots, scanpaths, AOI statistics, like time-to-first-fixation, dwell time, fixation duration, gaze revisits, and export of raw or processed data.
Good eye tracking analysis software allows researchers to define stimuli, manage recordings, enrich data, calculate metrics, compare participants, and export results for statistical analysis.
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1
Rucci, M., & Poletti, M. (2015). Control and Functions of Fixational Eye Movements. Annu Rev Vis Sci, 1, 499-518.
2
Galley, N., Betz, D., & Biniossek, C. (2015). Fixation durations – Why are they so highly variable? In T. Heinen (Hrsg.), Advances in visual perception research (pp.83-106). New York, NY: Nova Science.
3
Leigh, R.J., & Zee, D.S. (2015). The neurology of eye movements. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.