In contrast, head-mounted eye trackers have helped researchers design experiments that examine eye-movement behavior during everyday tasks in natural settings by allowing participants to move their heads, bodies, and eyes more normally (Holmqvist et al.,
2011). This has amounted to an increase in literature about human behavior in more natural, everyday tasks—like driving (Land & Lee,
1994), handwashing (Pelz & Canosa,
2001), and preparing a sandwich (Hayhoe,
2000; Hayhoe, Shrivastava, Mruczek, & Pelz,
2003) or cup of tea (Land, Mennie, & Rusted,
1999)—leading to important generalizations about eye behavior during complex tasks (Land & Hayhoe,
2001; Hayhoe et al.,
2003; Hayhoe & Ballard,
2005; Land,
2009; Tatler, Hayhoe, Land, & Ballard,
2011). For example, we know that the eyes strongly precede and predict almost every action, suggesting that the visuomotor system solves object-interaction problems in real time (Land & Hayhoe,
2001; Land,
2009; Tatler et al.,
2011). In addition, monitoring eye behavior during complex tasks allows assessment of the impact of internal reward systems (Hayhoe & Ballard,
2005; Tatler et al.,
2011) and implicit memory structures (Chun & Nakayama,
2000; Hayhoe et al.,
2003) on optimal planning and coordination of eye and hand movements in the real world. However, providing freedom to participants to accomplish the goals of an open-ended complex task can result in higher variability in performance, as each participant may carry out the task in a different order (Land et al.,
1999). This allows some generalizability of eye-behavior, but specific temporal dynamics between the eyes, head, and body are not able to be systematically observed. For example, Land and Hayhoe (
2001) showed that participants make a saccade away from an object being grasped to its future drop-off location but were not able to identify the exact timing of this saccade relative to when the object began moving. Thus, although important and informative, these studies provide only a coarse level of functional resolution of eye-movement behavior during object-interaction tasks.