Gaze Behavior Reveals Expectations of Potential Scene Changes.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Traditional visual attention studies often use static images, which may not reflect real-world dynamic scene exploration.
• Understanding how expectations influence gaze behavior is crucial for comprehending visual attention in natural environments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether top-down expectations of change affect gaze behavior when viewing static representations of natural scenes.
• To compare visual exploration of frozen videos versus static images to reveal differences in attention allocation.

Main Methods:

• Collected free-viewing eye-tracking data from 20 healthy adults.
• Utilized a novel video dataset of natural scenes, rated for their potential for change (PfC).
• Analyzed gaze patterns when participants viewed frozen videos compared to static images.

Main Results:

• Participants fixated more on high PfC areas in frozen videos than in static images.
• Viewing patterns for frozen videos showed higher interobserver coherence.
• Gaze differences were most pronounced just before a potential movement onset.

Conclusions:

• Experience-based expectations about scene dynamics significantly influence gaze behavior, even when the scene is visually static.
• Static images may not fully capture the complexities of visual attention in dynamic environments.
• Existing models of object animacy and salience do not fully explain these expectation-driven gaze patterns.