Eye-movement research: an overview of current and past developments

This opening chapter begins with an overview of the issues and questions addressed in the remainder of this volume, the contents of which reflect the wide diversity of eye movement research. We then provide the reader with an up to date impression of the most significant developments in the area, based on findings from a survey of eye-movement researchers and database searches. We find that the most heavily cited publications are not necessarily those rated as most influential. It is clear that eye movement research is published across a wide variety of journals and the number of articles is increasing, but the relative proportion of eye-movement articles has remained relatively constant. The USA produces the largest number of these articles, but other countries actually produce more per capita. Finally, we see that computational modelling, new eye-tracking technologies and anatomical and physiological mapping of the visual-oculomotor system are viewed as the most important recent developments.