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Eye movements during free viewing to maximize scene understanding.
Shravan Murlidaran1, Miguel P Eckstein2,3,4
1Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA. smurlidaran@ucsb.edu.
Nature Communications
|December 21, 2025
Summary
Human eye movements during scene viewing are crucial for comprehension. Free viewing eye movements help us understand scenes by focusing on elements that significantly alter interpretation, not just salient objects.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Neuroscience
- Computer Vision
Background:
- Understanding human visual attention during free viewing is limited.
- Scene interpretation relies on complex visual processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate eye movement patterns during free scene viewing.
- To determine the function of free-viewing eye movements in scene comprehension.
Main Methods:
- Measured observer eye movements while viewing altered image pairs (Winograd images).
- Compared fixation patterns across different viewing instructions (free viewing, describing, counting, searching).
Main Results:
- Free-viewing fixations align with scene description tasks, not object search.
- Fixations target objects critical to scene interpretation, not just salient regions.
- Image alterations impacting scene understanding, but not salience, changed fixation patterns.
Conclusions:
- Free-viewing eye movements are functionally important for accurate scene comprehension.
- The default task of human free viewing is scene comprehension.
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