Enhancing eye tracking for nonhuman primates and other subjects unable to follow instructions: Adaptive calibration and validation of Tobii eye trackers with the Titta toolbox.

Accurate eye tracking is crucial for gaze-dependent research, but calibrating eye trackers in subjects who cannot follow instructions, such as human infants and nonhuman primates, presents a challenge. Traditional calibration methods rely on verbal instructions, which are ineffective for these populations. To address this, researchers often use attention-grabbing stimuli in known locations; however, existing software for video-based calibration is often proprietary and inflexible. We introduce an extension to the open-source toolbox Titta-a software package integrating desktop Tobii eye trackers with PsychToolbox experiments-to facilitate custom video-based calibration. This toolbox extension offers a flexible platform for attracting attention, calibrating using flexible point selection, and validating the calibration. The toolbox has been refined through extensive use with chimpanzees, baboons, and macaques, demonstrating its effectiveness across species. Our adaptive calibration and validation procedures provide a standardized method for achieving more accurate gaze tracking, enhancing gaze accuracy across diverse species.
Competing Interests: Declarations. Ethics approval: At the Keeling Center, this research was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (# 0894-RN01) and Texas A&M University (# 2022–0089 EX), followed the guidelines of the Institute of Medicine on the participation of chimpanzees in research, and complied with the Society for Neuroscience Policy on Ethics. In Shanghai, the procedures were approved by the Animal Committee of the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and were in accordance with the US National Institutes of Health Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Open practices statement: The discussed toolbox is available from https://github.com/dcnieho/titta . Consent to participate: Not applicable. Consent for publication: Not applicable. Competing interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
(© 2024. The Author(s).)