History and Goals
In the early 1980s, under the initiative of Rudolf Groner (Bern), Dieter Heller (at that time in Bayreuth) and Henk Breimer (Tilburg), a transdisciplinary network was founded under the informal name of “European Group of Scientists active in Eye Movement Research.” It was joined by numerous scientists from various research areas, all using eye movement registration as a research tool and developing models based on oculomotor data over a wide range of phenomena, from the neurophysiological to the perceptual and the cognitive level. The group’s goals include facilitating the exchange of information about current research, equipment, and software, and to organize a conference every two years at a different location around Europe.
Previous Conferences
ECEM 1 1981, September 16-19, Bern, Switzerland
ECEM 2 1983, September 19-23, Nottingham, UK
ECEM 3 1985, September 24-27, Dourdan (Paris), France
ECEM 4 1987, September 21 - 24, Göttingen, Germany
ECEM 5 1989, September 10-13, Pavia, Italy
ECEM 6 1991, September 15-18, Leuven, Belgium
ECEM 7 1993, August 31-September 3, Durham, UK
ECEM 8 1995, September 6-9, Derby, UK
ECEM 9 1997, September 23-26, Ulm, Germany
ECEM 12 2003, August 20-24, Dundee, Scotland
ECEM 13 2005, August 14-18, Bern, Switzerland
ECEM 20 2019, August 18-22, Alicante, Spain
A number of former conference chairs serve in the present ECEM scientific committee, a body tasked with selecting conference venues and providing strategic advice to the organising team.
The ECEM conference series is unique in that it combines different scientific perspectives: There is excellent basic research aimed to better understand the neural and sensorimotor processes governing the control of eye movements. Furthermore, as eye movements are part and parcel of human perception and information processing, they are widely used as a research tool to study important domains of our mental life such as reading, learning and problem solving, emotion, and social cognition. Finally, there is a rapid growth of real-life applications in clinical, educational, and industrial contexts.