Eyetracking

This is cool stuff. The idea is that we can learn about attention by knowing where people are looking.

Our eyetracker is an Eyelink II. We track a person's pupils by shining a very weak infrared light in them that is reflected onto the screen they are looking at and detected by these little detecter-thingies...sorry, I don't know what they are exactly. They sit on the four corners of the screen.

Anyway, we put this headgear on the participants with a camera pointing at each eye. I spend forever trying to get the cameras correctly placed (I'm getting faster but arm the camera sits on has three degrees of freedon, and the camera has two - yikes) and then have them stare at dots on the screen so we can calibrate the machine.

Finally, we show them a movie or a picture and ask them questions or get them to make key press responses to things on screen.

Eventually, though I haven't got to this part yet. We take the text file of data from the participant and translate it into something useful...like where a participant looked over a certain period of time or how often a participant looked at a particular object.

Questions welcome :)