Navigating Through the Experienced Environment: Insights From Mobile Eye Tracking

Abstract

Researchers are acutely interested in how people engage in social interactions and navigate their environment. However, in striving for experimental or laboratory control, we often instead present individuals with representations of social and environmental constructs and infer how they would behave in more dynamic and contingent interactions. Mobile eye tracking (MET) is one approach to connecting the laboratory to the experienced environment. MET superimposes gaze patterns captured through head- or eyeglass-mounted cameras pointed at the eyes onto a separate camera that captures the visual field. As a result, MET allows researchers to examine the world from the point of view of the individual in action. This review touches on the methods and questions that can be asked with this approach, illustrating how MET can provide new insight into social, behavioral, and cognitive processes from infancy through old age.

Variable- and person-centered approaches to affect-biased attention in infancy reveal unique relations with infant negative affect and maternal anxiety

“…This information, in the context of either maternal anxiety, negative affect, or both may generate profiles of social avoidance. Mobile eye-tracking technology 44 , 45 , may help determine if visual attention patterns evident in computer-based tasks also carry over to dynamic social interactions.…”

Capturing interactions, correlations, fits, and transactions: A Person-Environment Relations Model

“…Thus, it is important to measure person→environment NMs not just via self-reports but ideally also observationally or behaviorally (i.e., what persons actually do to/with their environments). This has been difficult so far, but novel smartphone and machine sensor technology may alleviate this problem and make such measurements possible in a continuous, fine-grained, and unobtrusive manner (e.g., Blake et al, in press;Harari et al, 2017, in press;Harari et al, Chapter 29;Miller, 2012;Pérez-Edgar, MacNeill, & Fu, 2020), of course keeping legal and ethical issues in mind. There is no reason to believe that environment-based mechanisms have to follow the same molds as person-based mechanisms, even if that would be easier to process and be more elegant.…”

Eye tracking in human interaction: Possibilities and limitations

“…Virtual and augmented reality systems typically take the form of goggles or glasses that are mounted on the head and can be considered to follow the same principles as head-free setups. At first glance, it might make sense to use head-free setups as the primary choice to investigate human interaction, as they allow the user to freely engage with the environment (see Franchak, 2020 ; Pérez-Edgar, MacNeill, & Fu, 2020 for further discussion of the possibilities of wearable eye tracking). This is reflected in the number of interaction studies with head-free setups compared to studies with head-boxed and head-restricted setups (see Table 1 ).…”