Scientists can now tell where you're looking by listening to your ears

Amazing stuff!

"Back in 2018, scientists at Duke University discovered that each time our eyes move, our ears make an imperceptible squeaking noise. Now, the researchers have developed a method of telling where a person is looking by analyzing those sounds. ...

Lead scientist ... believes that they may occur as eye movements trigger the brain to contract either the middle ear muscles or the hair cells – doing the former helps dampen loud noises, while doing the latter amplifies quiet ones.

This arrangement could help us make sense of our surroundings, by automatically adjusting the sensitivity of our hearing based on what we're looking at. ..."

"... The exact purpose of these ear squeaks is unclear, but [researcher]’s initial hunch is that it might help sharpen people’s perception. ...
Just as the eye’s pupils constrict or dilate like a camera’s aperture to adjust how much light gets in, the ears too have their own way to regulate hearing. ..."

From the significance and abstract:

"Significance

... Here, we show that the small sounds generated within the ear by the brain contain accurate information about contemporaneous eye movements in the spatial domain: The direction and amplitude of the eye movements could be inferred from these small sounds. The underlying mechanism(s) likely involve(s) the ear’s various motor structures and could facilitate the translation of incoming auditory signals into a frame of reference anchored to the direction of the eyes and hence the visual scene.

Abstract

Eye movements alter the relationship between the visual and auditory spatial scenes. Signals related to eye movements affect neural pathways from the ear through auditory cortex and beyond, but how these signals contribute to computing the locations of sounds with respect to the visual scene is poorly understood. Here, we evaluated the information contained in eye movement-related eardrum oscillations (EMREOs), pressure changes recorded in the ear canal that occur in conjunction with simultaneous eye movements. We show that EMREOs contain parametric information about horizontal and vertical eye displacement as well as initial/final eye position with respect to the head. The parametric information in the horizontal and vertical directions can be modeled as combining linearly, allowing accurate prediction of the EMREOs associated with oblique (diagonal) eye movements. Target location can also be inferred from the EMREO signals recorded during eye movements to those targets. We hypothesize that the (currently unknown) mechanism underlying EMREOs could impose a two-dimensional eye-movement-related transfer function on any incoming sound, permitting subsequent processing stages to compute the positions of sounds in relation to the visual scene."

Scientists can now tell where you're looking by listening to your ears

Your Eyes Talk to Your Ears. Scientists Know What They’re Saying. A new finding that eye movements can be decoded by the sounds they generate in the ear reveals that hearing may be affected by vision.

Parametric information about eye movements is sent to the ears (open access)