Abstract
How are eyes and head adapted to meet the demands of visual exploration in different tasks and environments? In two studies, we measured the horizontal movements of the eyes (using mobile eye tracking in Studies 1 and 2) and the head (using inertial sensors in Study 2) while participants completed a walking task and a search and retrieval task in a large, outdoor environment. We found that the spread of visual exploration was greater while searching compared with walking, and this was primarily driven by increased movement of the head as opposed to the eyes. The contributions of the head to gaze shifts of different eccentricities was greater when searching compared to when walking. Findings are discussed with respect to understanding visual exploration as a motor action with multiple degrees of freedom.
Highlights
Visual exploration refers to the active process of looking around in the environment
The predominant paradigm for measuring visual exploration is recording eye movements in observers who look at screens
To synchronize the head movement time series to the eye-tracking time series, we identified the head-turn synchronization events in the eye tracker’s field of view (FOV) camera video and the matching timestamp from the head rotation time series data from a plot
Summary
Visual exploration refers to the active process of looking around in the environment. The novel contributions of the current studies are: 1) direct comparisons of visual exploration between walking and searching tasks, and 2) comparing head movements and eye-plus-head gaze shifts, not just eye movements, across tasks.
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