Central fixations with rightward deviations: Saccadic eye movements on the landmark task

Neurologically normal individuals show an attentional bias toward the left side, which results from right hemisphere activation during visuospatial tasks. The strength of this bias is influenced by various factors, such as line length, vertical elevation and presentation time. What remains unknown is how participants gather information via saccadic eye movements during task performance and how this relates to their responses. Eye movements were recorded while participants performed the landmark task. Fixations and saccades were both analysed to gain a complete understanding of eye movement patterns. Fixations tended to focus on the centre of the line, with few left-right differences. Saccades were examined by creating histograms illustrating all x-coordinates which were examined over the course of each trial. Interestingly, mean eye position varied with participant response, with an overall tendency to look to the right of centre. Results are consistent with prior research, which has primarily looked at fixations and demonstrates the necessity of examining saccades as well as fixations in order to see how eye movement patterns relate to pseudoneglect.