Abstract
Human eye movements are stereotyped and repeatable. Could they be used in biometric identification? As part of the PERGENIC test battery, we recorded saccades, anti-saccades and smooth-pursuit eye movements in a sample of over 1000 healthy young adults. Measurements were made with a head-mounted infra-red eye tracker (JAZZ-novo, Ober Consulting). A randomly selected subsample of participants were re-tested on a second occasion, after an interval of at least one week, allowing us to estimate reliabilities.
Each of several derived measures, including latencies, accuracies, velocities and left-right asymmetries, proved to be very reliable. The profile of our oculomotor measures for an individual constitutes a personal oculomotor signature that distinguishes that individual from most other members of the sample of 1000 participants. Eye movements may have potential as biometric measures, but the testing time required (25 minutes) to achieve the high reliabilities recorded in the present study are several orders of magnitude greater than would be suitable for a practical system.
There were highly significant and substantial (> 10%) sex differences in the proportion of dynamic overshoots in pro-saccades and in the frequency of catch-up saccades in smooth pursuit. There were smaller but significant sex differences in latencies for initiating saccades and in the gain and root mean square error of smooth pursuit.
Funding: Gatsby Charitable Foundation (GAT2903)