Eye Tracking: Curtain Call

An interesting article popped up recently on a blog written by Tim Boucher, a self-proclaimed college drop-out-turned-researcher/blogger who deals with subjects including biological systems, consciousness, psychology of the mind, and the human experience in general. As a working production assistant on theatrical plays, Boucher has become interested in the idea of the human perceptual system as a sort of theater, and in a recent post he highlighted a few ideas in association with eye tracking.

When backstage, the production assistant’s responsibilities include following along with a copy of the script during each performance, tracking where the actors are and what’s happening onstage to essentially ensure that things go as planned. But Boucher makes an observation that after weeks into his current show, he no longer needs to follow along like he used to. Perhaps he’s getting more experienced and able, as he says, to simultaneously perform other light tasks such as drawing, reading, typing, email, and general online searching. The author says he is able to keep part of his awareness tuned into certain clues, which orient him within the space of the play – the sequential space of the play. This is due, he says, to his ability to visualize the actual script without having to reference it. I suppose if you know something well enough, there isn’t a need to continually refer to it.

Boucher divides the open script into six quadrants, with three on each page: upper left, middle left, lower left, upper right, middle right, and lower right. And apparently, he knows, by quadrants, what part of the page the actors are at any given point during the performance. This is effective for quick reference, remembering where the actual line lay within the pages of the script. He’s able to follow along with performance, keeping pace with the actors, while still maintaining some degree of attention on another task he’s doing in his spare time.

To a certain extent, this just seems like basic multi-tasking, but Boucher is interested in the spatial orientation his brain remembers and references on the script through the play. It’s almost as if he has the script before him, though he doesn’t have to sit and physically move his eyes along the page to follow, utilizing a form of procedural memory.

Perhaps it’s a bit like muscle memory – the idea that you can perform a physical task without having to refresh or rehearse beforehand – you’ve done it so many times, the action is stored away and ready to access.

Boucher goes on to relate eye tracking and his learning about saccades and fixations, an eye tracking phenomenon we’ve discussed on Eye Tracking Update before, to the way his memory jumps spatially and sequentially from node to node, or word to word. It’s an intriguing comparison.

Eye Tracking, Method of Loci, and Spatial-Sequential Memory

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