Eye Tracking Research & Applications Symposium 2002 Keynote Address

Our knowledge of the way that the visual system operates in everyday behavior has, until recently, been very limited. This information is critical not only for understanding visual function, but also for understanding the consequences of various kinds of visual impairment, and for the development of interfaces between human and artificial systems. The development of eye trackers that can be mounted on the head now allows monitoring of gaze without restricting the observer's movements. Observations of natural behavior have demonstrated the highly task-specific and directed nature of fixation patterns, and reveal considerable regularity between observers. Eye, head, and hand coordination also reveals much greater flexibility and task-specificity than previously supposed. Experimental examination of the issues raised by observations of natural behavior requires the development of complex virtual environments that can be manipulated by the experimenter at critical points during task performance. Experiments where we monitored gaze in a simulated driving environment demonstrate that visibility of task relevant information depends critically on active search initiated by the observer according to an internally generated schedule, and this schedule depends on learnt regularities in the environment. In another virtual environment where observers copied toy models we showed that regularities in the spatial structure are used by observers to control eye movement targeting. Other experiments in a virtual environment with haptic feedback show that even simple visual properties like size are not continuously available or processed automatically by the visual system, but are dynamically acquired and discarded according to the momentary task demands.

Mary M. Hayhoe Professor, Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0268

As a member of Rochester's Center for Visual Science, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Resource for Neural Models of Behavior, Professor Hayhoe has extensive experience in vision and eye tracking research. She was one of the first to measure eye movements in Virtual Reality and is well known for her study of eye movements in natural tasks. She has received funding for her work from the NIH and AFOSR and has numerous publications in Science, Vision Research, Perception, and Cognitive Neuroscience, among many others. She has presented her research at ARVO, Cognitive Neurosciences, and has been invited to speak at various colloquia and international conferences.

After earning her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego (1979), Dr. Hayhoe has held appointments as Assistant and Associate Professor of Psychology (at Columbia University and then at the University of Rochester). She is currently appointed as Professor of Brain & Cognitive Science, and Professor of Computer Science at Rochester. She has acted as Director of Cognitive Science, and Associate Director of the Center for Visual Science.

Dr. Hayhoe has served as Associate Editor for Perception & Psychophysics, and currently serves as reviewer for Vision Research, Experimental Brain Research, Science, Cognitive Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Brain & Behavioral Sciences, Visual Cognition, Journal of Neurophysiology, and Perception.

She is currently developing a human sensory-motor lab, in collaboration with Dana Ballard, for measuring unconstrained eye, head, and hand movements in the performance of natural tasks, and for developing a virtual reality display to allow controlled but visually complex stimulation. Her proposed objective is to understand the demands placed on vision and motor systems by natural behavior and the nature of the representations that are required for visually guided tasks.