Cite as:
Keck I R, Fischer V, Lang E W, 2009, "Direct estimation of the point of gaze from fMRI data" Perception 38 ECVP Abstract Supplement, page 169

Direct estimation of the point of gaze from fMRI data

I R Keck, V Fischer, E W Lang

Task compliance tests form an important part in visual functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments. Infrared based eye-trackers are a well proven solution to estimate the point of gaze of the subject, however their use is often time-consuming, costly, uncomfortable for the subjects and sometimes even impossible due to head size and space restrictions in head-only scanners. Here we present a novel analysis technique that quantifies the eye movement directly from the fMRI data without the aid of dedicated eye-trackers. We show that by using the parts of the functional image data that contain the motion artefacts of the subject's eyes and by applying spatial independent component analysis, it is possible to detect eye movement and to estimate the direction of the eyes' point of gaze at the time of data acquisition. By means of various simple saccade experiments we were able to demonstrate that our method yields results comparable to the infrared eye-tracker data within the limitations of temporal resolution from fMRI image acquisition. Finally we present an open source SPM toolbox with the implementation of our technique.

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