Blink

Klin had Peter put on a hat with a very simple, but
powerful, eye-tracking device composed of two tiny cameras.
One camera recorded the movement of Peter’s fovea — the
centerpiece of his eye. The other camera recorded whatever it
was Peter was looking at, and then the two images were
superimposed. This meant that on every frame of the movie,
Klin could draw a line showing where Peter was looking at that
moment. He then had people without autism watch the movie
as well, and he compared Peter’s eye movements with theirs. In
one scene, for example, Nick (George Segal) is making polite
conversation, and he points to the wall of host George’s
(Richard Burton’s) study and asks, “Who did the painting?” The
way you and I would look at that scene is straightforward: our
eyes would follow in the direction that Nick is pointing, alight
on the painting, swivel back to George’s eyes to get his
response, and then return to Nick’s face, to see how he reacts to
the answer. All of that takes place in a fraction of a second, and
on Klin’s visual-scanning pictures, the line representing the gaze
of the normal viewer forms a clean, straight-edged triangle
from Nick to the painting to George and back again to Nick.
Peter’s pattern, though, is a little different. He starts
somewhere around Nick’s neck. But he doesn’t follow the