Technical information on the Eye-tracker used in Livingstone-Lee, Murchison, Zeman, Gandhi, van Gerven, Stewart, Livingston, and Skelton (2011) Title: Simple Gaze Analysis and Special Design of a Virtual Morris Water Maze Provides a New Method for Differentiating Egocentric and Allocentric Navigational Strategy Choice, Behavioural Brain Research.
Information as specified in the article:
The eye-tracking system used in these studies was developed by CanAssist (Canadian Institute for Accessibility and Inclusion) at the University of Victoria. The equipment consisted
of a digital camera (Flea Firewire, Point Grey Research, Vancouver, BC) fitted with an LED-infrared lighting system (Hamamatsu Corp.) consisting of a frame of lights placed around the lens. The camera/LED assembly was mounted on a swivel. The infrared light from the camera was reflected from the cornea of one of the participant‟s eyes and into the digital camera lens. A dedicated desktop computer recorded the eye movements of participants as positional 'x-y' coordinates at a frequency of 60 Hz and, on a second monitor visible only to the experimenter, displayed the current gaze position as a red ball, overlaid onto the maze trials. In this way, the experimenters were able to view the eye movements of the participants as they navigated the mazes. Participants were informed that their eye movements were being tracked. The eye tracking data was analyzed using MATLAB® (The Mathworks Inc.) to assess the location of gaze during the first second of the relevant trials.More detailed eye tracking apparatus specifications and the data collection and analysis software will soon be available.
Here is a sample of the eye tracker in use in our virtual environment. The red do is showing what the person was looking at: Sample of eye tracking in Place and Cue Mazes
(Page last updated 19 July 2011)