Read, Watch, Listen: A Commentary on Eye Tracking and Moving Images

Eye tracking is a research tool that has great potential for advancing our understanding of how we watch movies. Questions such as how differences in the movie influences where we look and how individual differences between viewers alters what we see can be operationalised and empirically tested using a variety of eye tracking measures. This special issue collects together an inspiring interdisciplinary range of opinions on what eye tracking can (and cannot) bring to film and television studies and practice. In this article I will reflect on each of these contributions with specific focus on three aspects: how subtitling and digital effects can reinvigorate visual attention, how audio can guide and alter our visual experience of film, and how methodological, theoretical and statistical considerations are paramount when trying to derive conclusions from eyetracking data.