Abstract
Complex stimuli and tasks elicit particular eye movement sequences. Previous research has focused on comparing between these scanpaths, particularly in memory and imagery research where it has been proposed that observers reproduce their eye movements when recognizing or imagining a stimulus. However, it is not clear whether scanpath similarity is related to memory performance and which particular aspects of the eye movements recur. We therefore compared eye movements in a picture memory task, using a recently proposed comparison method, MultiMatch, which quantifies scanpath similarity across multiple dimensions including shape and fixation duration. Scanpaths were more similar when the same participant’s eye movements were compared from two viewings of the same image than between different images or different participants viewing the same image. In addition, fixation durations were similar within a participant and this similarity was associated with memory performance.
Highlights
When viewing a stimulus too large to be apprehended in a single glance, observers make a series of fixations and saccades which occur in a particular sequence and which are associated with a location, duration and so on
We examine whether scanpaths are truly idiosyncratic; whether the similarity between scanpaths made by the same person encoding and recognizing an image correlates with memory performance; and which particular aspects of a scanpath are reproduced
If an individual uses the same scanpath when inspecting different pictures, these comparisons would have detected it, but the results suggested that viewers are sensitive to picture content because they varied their scanpaths between pictures
Summary
When viewing a stimulus too large to be apprehended in a single glance, observers make a series of fixations and saccades which occur in a particular sequence and which are associated with a location, duration and so on. We examine whether scanpaths are truly idiosyncratic (in the sense that they are particular to an individual); whether the similarity between scanpaths made by the same person encoding and recognizing an image correlates with memory performance; and which particular aspects of a scanpath are reproduced. To achieve these aims we apply a recently proposed method for scanpath comparison to previously reported data from a scene memory task
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