EyeLab: a user-friendly Matlab tool for real-time monitoring of eye movements

Despite the advantages of objective analysis of oculomotor behaviour and the continuous progresses in eye-tracking technologies, eye-movement studies are likely confined to research laboratories and seldom applied in the clinical practice. The neurologist's expertise in reading the traces from eye-trackers, along with the specialized technical knowledge required to manage, program and use such tools, hampered their widespread adoption. Recently, many open-source software tools have been developed to expand the usability of eye tracking systems to study oculomotor functioning, but none of these allows the experimenter to simultaneously control the trial and visualize and monitor eye movements in real-time. In this work, we present EyeLab, a new MATLAB graphical user interface developed for the analysis of both saccadic and smooth pursuit eye movements while using the video-based Eye Link II eye-tracker by SR Research. Developed by exploiting the Psychophysics Toolbox, it extends the functionalities of EyeLink II by introducing and managing an intuitive real-time monitoring user-friendly interface on a third screen, which also allows personalizing the experimental procedure and managing data acquisition, visualization, processing, and storage, without requiring programming skills to the user. The real-time features enable the prompt adaptation of the experimental protocol to the ongoing results and the correction of any setup problem that could affect the correct acquisition of a whole set of tests.