Abstract
Recent advances in the technology affording eye movement recordings carry the risk of neglecting past achievements. Without the assistance of this modern armoury, great strides were made in describing the ways the eyes move. For Aristotle the fundamental features of eye movements were binocular, and he described the combined functions of the eyes. This was later given support using simple procedures like placing a finger over the eyelid of the closed eye and culminated in Hering's law of equal innervation. However, the overriding concern in the 19th century was with eye position rather than eye movements. Appreciating discontinuities of eye movements arose from studies of vertigo. The characteristics of nystagmus were recorded before those of saccades and fixations. Eye movements during reading were described by Hering and by Lamare in 1879; both used similar techniques of listening to sounds made during contractions of the extraocular muscles. Photographic records of eye movements during reading were made by Dodge early in the 20th century, and this stimulated research using a wider array of patterns. In the mid-20th century attention shifted to the stability of the eyes during fixation, with the emphasis on involuntary movements. The contributions of pioneers from Aristotle to Yarbus are outlined.
Highlights
Aspects of behaviour that are universal and automatic seldom warrant description unless their normal functions are disrupted by disease or accident
Listing did not publish an account of it himself but it was initially described in Ruete’s (1853) book on ophthalmology. It was Helmholtz who named it Listing’s Law; it was concerned with describing the axis about which the eye rotates from the primary position. Helmholtz described it in the following way: for the case of a pair of emmetropic eyes with parallel lines of fixation, the law of their motion may be stated as follows: When the line of fixation is brought from its primary position into any other position, the torsional rotation of the eyeball in this second position will be the same as if the eye had been turned around a fixed axis perpendicular to the initial and final directions of the line of fixation
Crum Brown recognised that such discontinuous eye movements were not confined to post-rotational nystagmus, and despite what we might feel, our eyes always move by these jerks as we look around the world
Summary
Aspects of behaviour that are universal and automatic (like eye movements) seldom warrant description unless their normal functions are disrupted by disease or accident. This has certainly been the case for the study of eye movements, as attention to them has not matched that for most other aspects of vision In his classic book on the history of research on the senses and perception, Boring (1942) devoted much more space to the vagaries of vision (like illusions) than to the verities of oculomotor behaviour. Contemporary accounts of eye movements tend to fall under two headings—gaze stability and gaze shift (see Leigh and Zee 2006; Walls 1962) These divisions represent the distillations of centuries of study during which the dynamic features of oculomotor behaviour were only dimly appreciated. In this historical context, the development of descriptions and measurements will be arranged in terms of binocularity, torsion, visual vertigo, reading and scene viewing, and stability during fixation. Some of the pioneers are shown in figure 1, but others of great importance are not displayed either because no portraits of them have been found (like Lamare) or perhaps none exist (like Porterfield and Wells)
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