Eye-Tracking Software Shows Exactly How Frantic 'Overwatch' Is On The Senses

Eye-tracking technology is truly remarkable for its ability to turn something enjoyable like video games into something that's very, very stressful.

Humans are very visual animals, but we only really get high quality visual information from a fairly small area of our retina (called the "fovea centrails", roughly the width of your thumb at arm's length).

This area takes up roughly 1% of your visual field, but roughly 50% of your visual cortex is devoted to processing information from this area. That means that a huge part of the human strategy for surviving in the world revolves around our ability to quickly and accurately directing our fovea to the parts of the world that contain the information that we need to complete a given task.

Because eye movements are so central to our neural strategy, eye trackers are a very powerful tool for the study of human sensorimotor control - Basically, eye movements are a physical measurement that provides direct insight into your cognitive processes!  

(by: Jon Mattis)