Jason C. Coronel
Associate Professor, School of Communication, The Ohio State University
I study what eye movements can reveal about people beyond attention, such as what they remember, know, understand, and decide. As machines become increasingly capable of learning from our eyes, I also study what happens when machines use that information to judge us and act on those judgments.
Research: When machines learn from our eyes
Eye tracking is breaking out of the laboratory and into everyday life, from systems that monitor drivers’ visual attention to smartphones and extended-reality headsets. A car, for example, can monitor where a driver is looking, infer distraction, and issue a warning. These developments point toward a world in which machines routinely observe our eyes, draw conclusions about us, and act on those conclusions.
For more than a decade, my research has examined the less obvious information contained in our eye movements. My work has shown that eye movements can reveal what people remember, understand, know, and decide when they encounter civic and scientific information. Those findings take on new significance as eye tracking moves into everyday technologies. I now study what machines can reliably infer from our eyes outside the laboratory, when those inferences can be trusted, and how technologies that use and act on them can be governed.
I welcome conversations with researchers, industry professionals, policymakers, and others interested in the scientific and real-world implications of technologies that learn about us from the signals our bodies produce.
Background and Recognition
My research has appeared in Psychological Science, Cognition, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, and Political Communication. My work has received the Walter Lippmann Best Article of the Year Award from the American Political Science Association and Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association and National Communication Association.
Before joining Ohio State, I was an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My work draws on an interdisciplinary background spanning the social sciences, cognitive science, and the philosophy of science.