Stochastic modeling of Lévy-like human eye movements

The standard model of visual search dynamics is Brownian motion. However, recent research in cognitive science reveals that standard diffusion processes seem not to be the appropriate models of human looking behavior. In particular, experimental results confirm that the superdiffusive Lévy-type dynamics appears in this context. In this paper, we analyze the diffusive properties of human eye movement in a language comprehension task. We propose a model that is a combination of a Markov chain with a finite number of states and a Lévy walk. Our model fits well the experimental data and allows one to investigate the properties of the visual search dynamics using numerical simulations.