Eye Tracking History: An Early Eye Tracking Apparatus
A heavy apparatus that consists of several pieces of metal bolted together, forming a two-foot by two-foot box. Metal legs extending from each of the four corners. A sliding door with a small, pen sized hole. And within this contraption, a restrictive crib that prevents “gross head and body movements.” Doesn’t sound like something you would subject your newborn baby to, does it?
But years ago, this “looking chamber” is exactly where Dr. Robert L. Fantz, a developmental psychologist at Western Reserve University, would regularly place infants in order to study their vision habits and perform eye tracking studies. Known as the Fantz Infant Choice Apparatus, this device was recently “re-discovered” on the shelves of the Archives of the History of American Psychology and, as it turns out, was one of the first eye tracking technologies that gave scientists insight into babies’ behavior.
Dr. Fantz, who lived from 1925 to 1981, performed groundbreaking studies on pattern and spatial visual recognition abilities in infants, and is among the most often cited researchers in the field of developmental psychology today. Quite ingeniously, he decided to track infants’ eye-gaze to discern a baby’s visual preferences, realizing that an infant’s verbal, manual, and locomotor responses are limited.
Fantz’ “looking chamber” was instrumental in studying a baby’s gaze. A baby would be placed in a crib that slid into the box with felt lowered over the open side to isolate the baby from outside stimuli. A source of light was housed beneath the infant, casing upward towards the location of the stimuli. Then, a stimulus card was slid through the door at the top as the baby lay on their back. Fantz managed to position the source of lighting in the apparatus to reflect the pattern that the infant’s pupil was fixating on and calculating the amount of time the baby’s pupil lay on one visual stimulus or another. The infant’s selective preference was shown by which pattern was observed on the surface of the infant’s eye.
According to Dr. Fantz, if an infant gazed longer at one stimulus than another on a consistent basis, it could be interpreted as the infant’s preference, and his research led to an understanding and basic data of infants’ visual preference and a methodology for documenting the development of human vision. Babies were typically shown to favor faces over non-faces, an observation that still rings true in studies today.
As archaic as Fantz’ device sounds, with today’s field of head mounted eye tracking systems and onscreen heat-mapping grids, there’s no doubt we’ve come a long way. It makes you wonder just how dated current eye tracking technology will seem in retrospect 50 years from now.
The Original Eye Tracking Device
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