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We have recently finished updating our database of EyeLink publications – there were more than 900 papers published in 2019 alone, and the database now contains well over 8000 publications in total. Each publication is checked individually to ensure that it contains data collected using an EyeLink eye tracker (rather than just referring to data collected with an EyeLink, as in a meta-analysis or review article) and that the research is published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Publications by Year
In a previous blog I plotted the number of publications per year and an updated version of that plot is included below:
Highly Cited EyeLink Publications
The earlier blog also listed the “top” journals for EyeLink publications – both with respect to the number of EyeLink articles and with respect to the journal’s impact factor. This year I thought it might be interesting to list some of the most highly cited articles in our database. Determining citation counts is a somewhat inexact science. There are three main sources of information on article citation counts – Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. While the advantages and disadvantages of each of these sources is a topic of lively debate (Harzing has written extensively on this – see e.g. this blog), Google Scholar has the twin advantages of having a very comprehensive coverage and being freely accessible.
The list below is a selection of 15 EyeLink articles, all of which have citation counts >500 according to Google Scholar. The list was generated by searching the top 20 journals by volume of EyeLink articles, and the top 10 journals by Impact Factor in our database. It is not intended to be exhaustive, and the articles are listed in no particular order. I think the list provides a fascinating illustration of the sheer breadth (and enormous impact) of the research that EyeLink eye trackers have been involved in.
Piras, Alessandro; Trofè, Aurelio; Meoni, Andrea; Raffi, Milena Influence of radial optic flow stimulation on static postural balance in Parkinson's disease: A preliminary study Journal Article In: Human Movement Science, vol. 81, pp. 1–11, 2022. @article{Piras2022,The role of optic flow in the control of balance in persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) has yet to be studied. Since basal ganglia are understood to have a role in controlling ocular fixation, we have hypothesized that persons with PD would exhibit impaired performance in fixation tasks, i.e., altered postural balance due to the possible relationships between postural disorders and visual perception. The aim of this preliminary study was to investigate how people affected by PD respond to optic flow stimuli presented with radial expanding motion, with the intention to see how the stimulation of different retinal portions may alter the static postural sway. We measured the body sway using center of pressure parameters recorded from two force platforms during the presentation of the foveal, peripheral and full field radial optic flow stimuli. Persons with PD had different visual responses in terms of fixational eye movement characteristics, with greater postural alteration in the sway area and in the medio-lateral direction than the age-matched control group. Balance impairment in the medio-lateral oscillation is often observed in persons with atypical Parkinsonism, but not in Parkinson's disease. Persons with PD are more dependent on visual feedback with respect to age-matched control subjects, and this could be due to their impaired peripheral kinesthetic feedback. Visual stimulation of standing posture would provide reliable signs in the differential diagnosis of Parkinsonism. |
Narayanaswamy, Janardhanan C.; Subramaniam, Aditi; Bose, Anushree; Agarwal, Sri Mahavir; Kalmady, Sunil V.; Jose, Dania; Joseph, Boban; Shivakumar, Venkataram; Hutton, Samuel B.; Venkatasubramanian, Ganesan; Reddy, Y. C. Janardhan Antisaccade task performance in obsessive-compulsive disorder and its clinical correlates Journal Article In: Asian Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 57, pp. 102508, 2021. @article{Narayanaswamy2021,Objective: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is characterized by abnormalities in the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) circuitry of the brain. Antisaccade eye movement tasks measure aspects of the voluntary control of behaviour that are sensitive to CSTC circuitry dysfunction. Method: In this study, we examined antisaccade eye movement parameters of OCD patients in comparison with healthy controls (HC). In addition, we also examined the relationship between the antisaccade eye movement parameters and the severity of OCD. Antisaccade performance among right handed OCD patients (N = 65) was compared to matched right handed HC (N = 57). Eye tracking data during the task performance were collected using an Eye-Link eye-tracker at 1000-Hz sampling rate. OCD symptom severity was evaluated using Yale-Brown obsessive compulsive scale. Results: The antisaccade error percentage was significantly greater in OCD patients than HC (p < 0.001). In addition, OCD patients had less accurate final eye position compared to HC (p < 0.001). There were no significant correlation between antisaccade parameters and OCD severity measures. Conclusion: Deficient performance in antisaccade task supports CSTC abnormality in OCD and this appears to be independent of the illness severity. Examining this in remitted participants with OCD and in unaffected first degree relatives could help ascertaining their endophenotype validity. |
DiNicola, Lauren M.; Braga, Rodrigo M.; Buckner, Randy L. Parallel distributed networks dissociate episodic and social functions within the individual Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 123, no. 3, pp. 1144–1179, 2020. @article{DiNicola2020,Association cortex is organized into large-scale distributed networks. One such network, the default network (DN), is linked to diverse forms of internal mentation, opening debate about whether shared or distinct anatomy supports multiple forms of cognition. Using within-individual analysis procedures that preserve idiosyncratic anatomical details, we probed whether multiple tasks from two domains, episodic projection and theory of mind (ToM), rely on the same or distinct networks. In an initial experiment (6 subjects, each scanned 4 times), we found evidence that episodic projection and ToM tasks activate separate regions distributed throughout the cortex, with adjacent regions in parietal, temporal, prefrontal, and midline zones. These distinctions were predicted by the hypothesis that the DN comprises two parallel, interdigitated networks. One network, linked to parahippocampal cortex (PHC), is preferentially recruited during episodic projection, including both remembering and imagining the future. A second juxtaposed network, which includes the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), is differentially engaged during multiple forms of ToM. In two prospectively acquired independent experiments, we replicated and triplicated the dissociation (each with 6 subjects scanned 4 times). Furthermore, the dissociation was found in all zones when analyzed independently, including robustly in midline regions previously described as hubs. The TPJ-linked network is interwoven with the PHC-linked network across the cortex, making clear why it is difficult to fully resolve the two networks in group-averaged or lower-resolution data. These results refine our understanding of the functional-anatomical organization of association cortex and raise fundamental questions about how specialization might arise in parallel, juxtaposed association networks. |
Gruber, Liron Zipora; Ahissar, Ehud Closed loop motor-sensory dynamics in human vision Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 15, no. 10, pp. e0240660, 2020. @article{Gruber2020,Vision is obtained with a continuous motion of the eyes. The kinematic analysis of eye motion, during any visual or ocular task, typically reveals two (kinematic) components: saccades, which quickly replace the visual content in the retinal fovea, and drifts, which slowly scan the image after each saccade. While the saccadic exchange of regions of interest (ROIs) is commonly considered to be included in motor-sensory closed-loops, it is commonly assumed that drifts function in an open-loop manner, that is, independent of the concurrent visual input. Accordingly, visual perception is assumed to be based on a sequence of open-loop processes, each initiated by a saccade-triggered retinal snapshot. Here we directly challenged this assumption by testing the dependency of drift kinematics on concurrent visual inputs using real-time gaze-contingent-display. Our results demonstrate a dependency of the trajectory on the concurrent visual input, convergence of speed to condition-specific values and maintenance of selected drift-related motor-sensory controlled variables, all strongly indicative of drifts being included in a closed-loop brain-world process, and thus suggesting that vision is inherently a closed-loop process. |
Baran, Bengi; Correll, David; Vuper, Tessa C.; Morgan, Alexandra; Durrant, Simon J.; Manoach, Dara S.; Stickgold, Robert Spared and impaired sleep-dependent memory consolidation in schizophrenia Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Research, vol. 199, pp. 83–89, 2018. @article{Baran2018,Objective: Cognitive deficits in schizophrenia are the strongest predictor of disability and effective treatment is lacking. This reflects our limited mechanistic understanding and consequent lack of treatment targets. In schizophrenia, impaired sleep-dependent memory consolidation correlates with reduced sleep spindle activity, suggesting sleep spindles as a potentially treatable mechanism. In the present study we investigated whether sleep-dependent memory consolidation deficits in schizophrenia are selective. Methods: Schizophrenia patients and healthy individuals performed three tasks that have been shownto undergo sleep-dependent consolidation: the Word Pair Task (verbal declarative memory), the Visual Discrimination Task (visuoperceptual procedural memory), and the Tone Task (statistical learning). Memory consolidation was tested 24 h later, after a night of sleep. Results: Compared with controls, schizophrenia patients showed reduced overnight consolidation ofword pair learning. In contrast, both groups showed similar significant overnight consolidation of visuoperceptual procedural memory. Neither group showed overnight consolidation of statistical learning. Conclusion: The present findings extend the known deficits in sleep-dependent memory consolidation in schizophrenia to verbal declarative memory, a core, disabling cognitive deficit. In contrast, visuoperceptual procedural memorywas spared. These findings support the hypothesis that sleep-dependent memory consolidation deficits in schizophrenia are selective, possibly limited to tasks that rely on spindles. These findings reinforce the importance ofdeficient sleep-dependent memory consolidation among the cognitive deficits ofschizophrenia and suggest sleep physiology as a potentially treatable mechanism. |
Hartmann, Matthias; Laubrock, Jochen; Fischer, Martin H. The visual number world: A dynamic approach to study the mathematical mind Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 28–36, 2018. @article{Hartmann2018,In the domain of language research, the simultaneous presentation of a visual scene and its auditory description (i.e., the visual world paradigm) has been used to reveal the timing of mental mechanisms. Here we apply this rationale to the domain of numerical cognition in order to explore the differences between fast and slow arithmetic performance, and to further study the role of spatial-numerical associations during mental arithmetic. We presented 30 healthy adults simultaneously with visual displays containing four numbers and with auditory addition and subtraction problems. Analysis of eye movements revealed that participants look spontaneously at the numbers they currently process (operands, solution). Faster performance was characterized by shorter latencies prior to fixating the relevant numbers and fewer revisits to the first operand while computing the solution. These signatures of superior task performance were more pronounced for addition and visual numbers arranged in ascending order, and for subtraction and numbers arranged in descending order (compared to the opposite pairings). Our results show that the “visual number world”-paradigm provides on-line access to the mind during mental arithmetic, is able to capture variability in arithmetic performance, and is sensitive to visual layout manipulations that are otherwise not reflected in response time measurements. |
Kuperman, Victor; Matsuki, Kazunaga; Dyke, Julie A. Van Contributions of reader- and text-level characteristics to eye-movement patterns during passage reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 44, no. 11, pp. 1687–1713, 2018. @article{Kuperman2018,The present research presents a novel method for investigating how characteristics of texts (words, sentences, and passages) and individuals (verbal and general cognitive skills) jointly influence eye- movement patterns over the time-course of reading, as well as comprehension accuracy. Fifty-one proficient readers read passages of varying complexity from the Gray Oral Reading Test, while their eye-movements were recorded. Participants also completed a large battery of tests assessing various components of reading comprehension ability (vocabulary size, decoding, phonological awareness, and experience with print), as well as general cognitive and executive skills. We used the Random Forests nonparametric regression technique to simultaneously estimate relative importance of all predictors. This method enabled us to trace the temporal engagement of individual predictors and entire predictor groups on eye-movements during reading, while avoiding the problems of model overfitting and collinearity, typical of parametric regression methods. Our findings both confirmed well-established results of prior research and pointed to a space of hypotheses that is as yet unexplored. |
Mestre, Clara; Otero, Carles; Díaz-Doutón, Fernando; Gautier, Josselin; Pujol, Jaume An automated and objective cover test to measure heterophoria Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 13, no. 11, pp. e0206674, 2018. @article{Mestre2018,Heterophoria is the relative deviation of the eyes in absence of fusional vergence. Fusional vergence can be deprived by, for example, occluding one eye while the other fixates a visual target. Then, the occluded eye will presumably deviate from its initial position by an amount that corresponds to the heterophoria. Its assessment in clinical practice is crucial for the diagnosis of non-strabismic binocular dysfunctions such as convergence insufficiency. Traditional clinical methods, like the cover test or the modified Thorington test, suffer from practitioner's subjectivity, impossibility to observe the occluding eye or unusual viewing conditions. These limitations could be overcome by using eye tracking systems to measure objectively the heterophoria. The main purpose of this study was to compare the performance of an automated and objective method to measure near heterophoria using an eye-tracker with two conventional methods: the cover-uncover test and the modified Thorington test. The eye tracking method gave us the possibility to measure the heterophoria as the deviation of the occluded eye (mimicking the cover test) or as the deviations of the occluded and fixating eyes (adhering to the theoretical definition of heterophoria). The latter method provided smaller results than the former, although on average the differences might not be clinically relevant. The proposed objective method exhibited considerably better repeatabil-ity than the two conventional clinical methods. It showed better agreement with the modified Thorington test than with the cover-uncover test, and a similar level of agreement was obtained between the two clinical methods. To conclude, the use of eye-trackers to measure heterophoria provides objective and more repeatable measures. As eye-trackers become common tools in clinical settings, their use to measure heterophoria should be the new gold standard. |
Liu, Zhong-Xu; Shen, Kelly; Olsen, Rosanna K.; Ryan, Jennifer D. Visual sampling predicts hippocampal activity Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 599–609, 2017. @article{Liu2017c,Eye movements serve to accumulate information from the visual world, contributing to the formation of coherent memory representations that support cognition and behavior. The hippocampus and the oculomotor network are well connected anatomically through an extensive set of polysynaptic pathways. However, the extent to which visual sampling behavior is related to functional responses in the hippocampus during encoding has not been studied directly in human neuroimaging. In the current study, participants engaged in a face processing task while brain responses were recorded with fMRI and eye movements were monitored simultaneously. The number of gaze fixations that a participant made on a given trial was correlated significantly with hippocampal activation such that more fixations were associated with stronger hippocampal activation. Similar results were also found in the fusiform face area, a face-selective perceptual processing region. Notably, the number of fixations was associated with stronger hippocampal activation when the presented faces were novel, but not when the faces were repeated. Increases in fixations during viewing of novel faces also led to larger repetition-related suppression in the hippocampus, indicating that this fixation–hippocampal relationship may reflect the ongoing development of lasting representations. Together, these results provide novel empirical support for the idea that visual exploration and hippocampal binding processes are inherently linked. |
Cronin, Deborah A.; Brockmole, James R. Evaluating the influence of a fixated object's spatio-temporal properties on gaze control Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 78, no. 4, pp. 996–1003, 2016. @article{Cronin2016,Despite recent progress in understanding the factors that determine where an observer will eventually look in a scene, we know very little about what determines how an observer decides where he or she will look next. We investi- gated the potential roles of object-level representations in the direction ofsubsequent shifts ofgaze. In five experiments, we considered whether a fixated object's spatial orientation, im- plied motion, and perceived animacy affect gaze direction when shifting overt attention to another object. Eye move- ments directed away from a fixated object were biased in the direction it faced. This effect was not modified by implying a particular direction ofinanimate or animate motion. Together, these results suggest that decisions regarding where one should look next are in part determined by the spatial, but not by the implied temporal, properties of the object at the current locus of fixation. |
Retell, James D.; Venini, Dustin; Becker, Stefanie I. Oculomotor capture by new and unannounced color singletons during visual search Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 77, pp. 1529–1543, 2015. @article{Retell2015,The surprise capture hypothesis states that a stimulus will capture attention to the extent that it is preattentively available and deviates from task-expectancies. Interestingly, it has been noted by Horstmann (Psychological Science 13: 499–505. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00488, 2002, Human Perception and Performance 31: 1039–1060. doi:10.1037/ 00961523.31.5.1039, 2005, Psychological Research, 70, 13- 25, 2006) that the time course of capture by such classes of stimuli appears distinct from that of capture by expected stimuli. Specifically, attention shifts to an unexpected stimulus are delayed relative to an expected stimulus (delayed onset account). Across two experiments, we investigated this claim under conditions of unguided (Exp. 1) and guided (Exp. 2) search using eye-movements as the primary index of attentional selection. In both experiments, we found strong evidence of surprise capture for the first presentation of an unannounced color singleton. However, in both experiments the pattern of eye-movements was not consistent with a delayed onset account of attention capture. Rather, we observed costs associated with the unexpected stimulus only once the target had been selected. We propose an interference account of surprise capture to explain our data and argue that this account also can explain existing patterns of data in the literature. |
Eckstein, Miguel P.; Mack, Stephen C.; Liston, Dorion B.; Bogush, Lisa; Menzel, Randolf; Krauzlis, Richard J. Rethinking human visual attention: Spatial cueing effects and optimality of decisions by honeybees, monkeys and humans Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 85, pp. 5–9, 2013. @article{Eckstein2013,Visual attention is commonly studied by using visuo-spatial cues indicating probable locations of a target and assessing the effect of the validity of the cue on perceptual performance and its neural correlates. Here, we adapt a cueing task to measure spatial cueing effects on the decisions of honeybees and compare their behavior to that of humans and monkeys in a similarly structured two-alternative forced-choice perceptual task. Unlike the typical cueing paradigm in which the stimulus strength remains unchanged within a block of trials, for the monkey and human studies we randomized the contrast of the signal to simulate more real world conditions in which the organism is uncertain about the strength of the signal. A Bayesian ideal observer that weights sensory evidence from cued and uncued locations based on the cue validity to maximize overall performance is used as a benchmark of comparison against the three animals and other suboptimal models: probability matching, ignore the cue, always follow the cue, and an additive bias/single decision threshold model. We find that the cueing effect is pervasive across all three species but is smaller in size than that shown by the Bayesian ideal observer. Humans show a larger cueing effect than monkeys and bees show the smallest effect. The cueing effect and overall performance of the honeybees allows rejection of the models in which the bees are ignoring the cue, following the cue and disregarding stimuli to be discriminated, or adopting a probability matching strategy. Stimulus strength uncertainty also reduces the theoretically predicted variation in cueing effect with stimulus strength of an optimal Bayesian observer and diminishes the size of the cueing effect when stimulus strength is low. A more biologically plausible model that includes an additive bias to the sensory response from the cued location, although not mathematically equivalent to the optimal observer for the case stimulus strength uncertainty, can approximate the benefits of the more computationally complex optimal Bayesian model. We discuss the implications of our findings on the field's common conceptualization of covert visual attention in the cueing task and what aspects, if any, might be unique to humans. |
Hogarth, Lee; Dickinson, Anthony; Duka, Theodora The associative basis of cue-elicited drug taking in humans Journal Article In: Psychopharmacology, vol. 208, no. 3, pp. 337–351, 2010. @article{Hogarth2010,RATIONALE: Drug cues play an important role in motivating human drug taking, lapse and relapse, but the psychological basis of this effect has not been fully specified. METHOD: To clarify these mechanisms, the study measured the extent to which pictorial and conditioned tobacco cues enhanced smoking topography in an ad libitum smoking session simultaneously with cue effects on subjective craving, pleasure and anxiety. RESULTS: Both cue types increased the number of puffs consumed and craving, but pleasure and anxiety responses were dissociated across cue type. Moreover, cue effects on puff number correlated with effects on craving but not pleasure or anxiety. Finally, whereas overall puff number and craving declined across the two blocks of consumption, consistent with burgeoning satiety, cue enhancement of puff number and craving were both unaffected by satiety. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the data suggest that cue-elicited drug taking in humans is mediated by an expectancy-based associative learning architecture, which paradoxically is autonomous of the current incentive value of the drug. |
Rayner, Keith; Li, Xingshan; Williams, Carrick C.; Cave, Kyle R.; Well, Arnold D. Eye movements during information processing tasks: Individual differences and cultural effects Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 47, no. 21, pp. 2714–2726, 2007. @article{Rayner2007,The eye movements of native English speakers, native Chinese speakers, and bilingual Chinese/English speakers who were either born in China (and moved to the US at an early age) or in the US were recorded during six tasks: (1) reading, (2) face processing, (3) scene perception, (4) visual search, (5) counting Chinese characters in a passage of text, and (6) visual search for Chinese characters. Across the different groups, there was a strong tendency for consistency in eye movement behavior; if fixation durations of a given viewer were long on one task, they tended to be long on other tasks (and the same tended to be true for saccade size). Some tasks, notably reading, did not conform to this pattern. Furthermore, experience with a given writing system had a large impact on fixation durations and saccade lengths. With respect to cultural differences, there was little evidence that Chinese participants spent more time looking at the background information (and, conversely less time looking at the foreground information) than the American participants. Also, Chinese participants' fixations were more numerous and of shorter duration than those of their American counterparts while viewing faces and scenes, and counting Chinese characters in text. |
Belke, Eva Visual determinants of preferred adjective order Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 261–294, 2006. @article{Belke2006,In referential communication, speakers refer to a target object among a set of context objects. The NPs they produce are characterized by a canonical order of prenominal adjectives: The dimensions that are easiest to detect (e.g., absolute dimensions) are commonly placed closer to the noun than other dimensions (e.g., relative dimensions). This stands in stark contrast to the assumption that language production is an incremental process. According to this incremental-procedural view, the dimensions that are easiest to detect should be named first. In the present paper, an alternative account of the canonical order effect is presented, suggesting that the prenominal adjective ordering rules are a result of the perceptual analysis processes underlying the evaluation of distinctive target features. Analyses of speakers' eye movements during referential communication (Experiment 1) and analyses of utterance formats produced under time pressure (Experiment 2) provide evidence for the suggested perceptual classification account. |
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Image Credits
- Header Image by Hermann.
Evidence for Implicit Theory of Mind
