The Nature Sacred Award Initiative supports several projects investigating how humans benefit from being outside. One of these research projects is combing through the fine details of this overarching research endeavor using eye movement technology. Kardan and colleagues (2015) are investigating what we notice, focus on, prefer and feel when we view nature images. These findings will help landscape designers and therapists understand how to design a nearby nature space. In this newly released study, participants viewed images of natural scenes and were asked to either memorize the image, search for an object, or rate their preference of the scene.
Researchers were able to successfully predict which task the participants were engaging in based on their eye movements. Their study also revealed common underlying cognitive mechanisms across how people generally focus on an object. Being able to make general predictions about how the brain and eyes work together is important for many other theories and questions about how humans interact in their environment.
Eye movements are recorded using software and components tracking infrared light directed at and reflected from the eye. Eye movements generally reflect the cognitive processes and internal states that are active when we view our environment. A classic demonstration in 1967 asked a viewer to examine a painting depicting the homecoming of a political prisoner.
When the viewer was asked to determine the ages of the people in the painting she concentrated her fixations on the faces in the scene. When asked to determine the material circumstances of the family, she looked over many objects in the painting.
Since the mid-1960s research on eye movement and cognition has steadily increased. Therapists and health researchers use eye tracking technology and techniques with patients who suffer from trauma, anxiety and phobias. Viewing nature scenes has also been shown to improve mood and memory. A type of therapy called EMDR re-trains the eye movements associated with REM sleep. REM sleep is the period of sleep correlated with dreaming and influences how a person’s body processes emotions and thoughts.
Eye tracking research is also an emerging field in the consumer technology sector. Companies use eye tracking technology to understand what people look at on websites and smartphones. For example, Google Glass tracks what the wearer is looking at when walking down a street and provides relevant information in real-time. Eye tracking headsets worn during driving contributes to these technological advancements. Recent advancements have created video games controlled by eye movements. You can zap an asteroid just by looking at it!
The progress and breadth of applicability in eye tracking research is surprising. This small area of research has led to many questions, answers, technologies and therapies and is just one example of the outcomes of steady, detailed research.
—
Citations
Kardan, O., Berman, M. G., Yourganov, G., Schmidt, J., and Henderson, J. M. 2015. Classifying Mental States From Eye Movements During Scene Viewing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0039673
Kardan, O., Demiralp, E., Hout, M. C., Hunter, M. R., Karimi, H., Hanayik T., Yourganov, G., Jonides, J. and Berman M. G. 2015 b. Is the preference of natural versus man-made scenes driven by bottom–up processing of the visual features of nature? Frontiers in Psychology 6: 471. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00471
