Abstract
The present study examines eye movement behavior in real-world scenes with a large (N = 100) sample. We report baseline measures of eye movement behavior in our sample, including mean fixation duration, saccade amplitude, and initial saccade latency. We also characterize how eye movement behaviors change over the course of a 12 s trial. These baseline measures will be of use to future work studying eye movement behavior in scenes in a variety of literatures. We also examine effects of viewing task on when and where the eyes move in real-world scenes: participants engaged in a memorization and an aesthetic judgment task while viewing 100 scenes. While we find no difference at the mean-level between the two tasks, temporal- and distribution-level analyses reveal significant task-driven differences in eye movement behavior.
Highlights
Due to the acuity limits of peripheral vision, we must move our eyes to explore the world’s rich detail
In addition to affecting where we look in a scene, task influences more quantitative aspects of eye movement behavior
The amount of time participants remained at the center of the screen after the scene appeared tended to be shorter on average (M = 285 ms, SD = 119 ms) than the average fixation duration (M = 298 ms, SD = 64)
Summary
Due to the acuity limits of peripheral vision, we must move our eyes to explore the world’s rich detail. A wide range of disciplines study eye movements in photographs of scenes. Cognitive psychologists use these measures to study perception (e.g., Currie et al, 2000; Gajewski and Henderson, 2005; Henderson and Hollingworth, 1999; Rayner et al, 2009; Smith et al, 2012), attention (e.g., Brockmole and Henderson, 2005a,b; Brockmole and Võ, 2010; Wolfe et al, 2011a,b; Henderson and Hayes, 2017, 2018; Peacock et al, 2019) memory processes (e.g., Irwin and Zelinsky, 2002; Castelhano and Henderson, 2005; Hannula et al, 2012; Võ and Wolfe, 2012, 2013; Olejarczyk et al, 2014; Ramey et al, 2019), and language (e.g., Henderson and Ferreira, 2004; Altmann and Kamide, 2007, 2009; Henderson et al, 2018), among other topics. Measures of eye movements in scenes are used in social psychology
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