A theory of gaze behavior during real-world visual search

Human gaze control during real-world scene perception.

In human vision, acuity and color sensitivity are best at the point of fixation, and the visual-cognitive system exploits this fact by actively controlling gaze to direct fixation towards important and informative scene regions in real time as needed. How gaze control operates over complex real-world scenes has recently become of central concern in several core cognitive science disciplines inc...

Visual Saliency Does Not Account for Eye Movements during Visual Search in Real-world Scenes

We tested the hypothesis that fixation locations during scene viewing are primarily determined by visual salience. Eye movements were collected from participants who viewed photographs of real-world scenes during an active search task. Visual salience as determined by a popular computational model did not predict region-to-region saccades or saccade sequences any better than did a random model....

Gamification of Visual Search in Real World Scenes

How Chromaticity Guides Visual Search in Real-World Scenes

To study visual attention during search processes, numerous studies measured the selectivity of observers’ saccadic eye movements for local display features. These experiments almost entirely relied on simple, artificial displays with discrete search items and features. Recently, a first study on saccadic selectivity in real-world scenes was conducted, demonstrating visual guidance by low-level...

Real-world visual search is dominated by top-down guidance

How do bottom-up and top-down guidance signals combine to guide search behavior? Observers searched for a target either with or without a preview (top-down manipulation) or a color singleton (bottom-up manipulation) among the display objects. With a preview, reaction times were faster and more initial eye movements were guided to the target; the singleton failed to attract initial saccades unde...