Alfred L. Yarbus was a Russian psychologist

Psychologist

Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...

 (known there as Alfred Lukjanovic Jarbus) who studied eye movements in the 1950s and 1960s.

Yarbus pioneered the study of saccadic

Saccade

A saccade is a fast movement of an eye, head or other part of an animal's body or device. It can also be a fast shift in frequency of an emitted signal or other quick change. Saccades are quick, simultaneous movements of both eyes in the same direction...

 exploration of complex images, by recording the eye movements performed by observers while viewing natural objects and scenes. In this very influential work, Yarbus showed that the trajectories

Trajectory

A trajectory is the path that a moving object follows through space as a function of time. The object might be a projectile or a satellite, for example. It thus includes the meaning of orbit—the path of a planet, an asteroid or a comet as it travels around a central mass...

 followed by the gaze depend on the task that the observer has to perform. The gaze tends to jump back and forth between the same parts of the scene, for example, the eyes and mouth in the picture of a face. If the observer was asked specific questions about the images, his/her eyes would concentrate on areas of the images of relevance to the questions.

Yarbus also invented the suction cap, one version of which includes an optical system that can be attached by suction to the human eye to study visual perceptions in the absence of eye movements, a laboratory condition called retinal stabilization.

Books

A. L. Yarbus, Eye Movements and Vision. New York: Plenum Press, 1967. (Translated from Russian by Basil Haigh. Original Russian edition published in Moscow in 1965.)

See also

• Sequence learning
  Sequence learning
  Sequence learning is inherent to human ability because it is an integrated part of conscious and nonconscious learning as well as activities. Sequences of information or sequences of actions are used in various everyday tasks: "from sequencing sounds in speech, to sequencing movements in typing or...
  
  
• Psychology
  Psychology
  Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
  
  
• Psychophysics
  Psychophysics
  Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they effect. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual...
  
  
• Eye tracking
  Eye tracking
  Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze or the motion of an eye relative to the head. An eye tracker is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movement. Eye trackers are used in research on the visual system, in psychology, in cognitive linguistics and in product...
  
  
• Saccade
  Saccade
  A saccade is a fast movement of an eye, head or other part of an animal's body or device. It can also be a fast shift in frequency of an emitted signal or other quick change. Saccades are quick, simultaneous movements of both eyes in the same direction...
  
  

External links

• Strategic Networks (an application of Yarbus's scanpaths to improve learning in the classroom)

• Yarbus revisited: task-dependent oculomotor behavior (a replication study)

• Yarbus lives: a foveated exploration of how task influences saccadic eye movement (a replication study)