Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To cause (a person or the eyes) to look at or pay attention to something steadily.
  • intransitive verb To focus one's eyes or attention on.
  • intransitive verb To command the attention of exclusively or repeatedly; preoccupy obsessively.
  • intransitive verb To cause to become emotionally attached in an immature or pathological manner.
  • intransitive verb In classical psychoanalysis, to cause (the libido) to be arrested at an early stage of psychosexual development.
  • intransitive verb To focus the eyes or attention.
  • intransitive verb To become attached to a person or thing in an immature or pathological way; form a fixation.
  • intransitive verb To be arrested at an early stage of psychosexual development.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In psychological and physiological optics, to direct the eyes upon; bring within the area of clearest vision.
  • To fix or render stable; fix or confine in one place, state, or condition.
  • To determine or ascertain the position of: as, to fixate a star.
  • To become fixed.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb To make something fixed and stable; to fix.
  • verb To stare fixedly at something.
  • verb To attend to something to the exclusion of all others.
  • verb psychology To attach oneself to a person or thing in a pathological or neurotic manner.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb pay attention to exclusively and obsessively
  • verb make fixed, stable or stationary
  • verb attach (oneself) to a person or thing in a neurotic way
  • verb become fixed (on)

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Mr. FEHRMAN: As a culture, we just kind of fixate on this idea of a writer who's alone and doing his work.

    An Author's Personal Library Lost And Found 2010

  • In the first condition the subjects had to keep fixating a central cross at the time of sample dots presentation that appeared 5 deg above the cross ( 'fixate' trials).

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Anna Oleksiak et al. 2010

  • In the 'fixate' trials, however, there is no 1: 1 relation between sample dots 'eccentricity and the separation between them.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Anna Oleksiak et al. 2010

  • Ultimately, only the smallest separation in the 'fixate' condition was within the regime of the Weber's Law (ratio lower than 0.5), whereas the remaining conditions should be mainly influenced by the eccentricity of the furthest dot.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Anna Oleksiak et al. 2010

  • For that purpose we manipulated the instructions to either 'fixate' a central cross during the sample presentation or to 'saccade' towards the appearing sample dots.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Anna Oleksiak et al. 2010

  • Consecutive stages of 'fixate' and 'saccade' trials.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Anna Oleksiak et al. 2010

  • For the 'fixate' (dashed line with asterisks) encoding condition, the eccentricity was calculated as the mean eccentricity of the most peripheral dot of a sample pair of dots. doi: 10.1371/journal. pone.0009918.g003

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Anna Oleksiak et al. 2010

  • Contrary to that, in the 'fixate' condition, the eccentricity of the most peripheral dot differed from the sample distance.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Anna Oleksiak et al. 2010

  • The difference in decoded locations (separations) for the 'fixate' and 'saccade' trials are plotted in Theoretical neuronal populations response to a pair of dots.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Anna Oleksiak et al. 2010

  • If the word 'fixate' was displayed, the participants had to keep fixating at a subsequently presented central cross while the sample dots appeared 5 deg above on the monitor

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Anna Oleksiak et al. 2010

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  • Just for fun

    February 25, 2010