Abstract
Gaze behavior in natural scenes has been shown to be influenced not only by top–down factors such as task demands and action goals but also by bottom–up factors such as stimulus salience and scene context. Whereas gaze behavior in the context of static pictures emphasizes spatial accuracy, gazing in natural scenes seems to rely more on where to direct the gaze involving both anticipative components and an evaluation of ongoing actions. Not much is known about gaze behavior in far-aiming tasks in which multiple task-relevant targets and distractors compete for the allocation of visual attention via gaze. In the present study, we examined gaze behavior in the far-aiming task of taking a soccer penalty. This task contains a proximal target, the ball; a distal target, an empty location within the goal; and a salient distractor, the goalkeeper. Our aim was to investigate where participants direct their gaze in a natural environment with multiple potential fixation targets that differ in task relevance and salience. Results showed that the early phase of the run-up seems to be driven by both the salience of the stimulus setting and the need to perform a spatial calibration of the environment. The late run-up, in contrast, seems to be controlled by attentional demands of the task with penalty takers having habitualized a visual routine that is not disrupted by external influences (e.g., the goalkeeper). In addition, when trying to shoot a ball as accurately as possible, penalty takers directed their gaze toward the ball in order to achieve optimal foot-ball contact. These results indicate that whether gaze is driven by salience of the stimulus setting or by attentional demands depends on the phase of the actual task.
Highlights
One of the most prominent puzzles in vision science concerns how the oculomotor system determines where to look in complex natural environments
We focused on the following questions: (a) How does the penalty taker’s gaze behavior change during the run-up? (b) Does the presence or absence of a distractor affect the penalty taker’s gaze behavior? (c) Does the gaze behavior of the penalty taker affect shooting performance?
We suggest that this pattern of gaze behavior appears to be due to the salience of the goalkeeper, and the fact that penalty takers are accustomed to seeing a goalkeeper between the goalposts
Summary
One of the most prominent puzzles in vision science concerns how the oculomotor system determines where to look in complex natural environments. A common conceptualization of the first mechanism is based on the notion of a saliency map (e.g., Koch and Ullman, 1985; Itti and Koch, 2000) This is a twodimensional representation of the visual environment in which the most salient object corresponds to a single location that determines the target of oculomotor action in a winnertake-all manner. Despite the popularity of this saliency map approach when explaining how the oculomotor system selects fixation targets, previous research has estimated the accuracy of predicting the target location of gaze fixations correctly to be only 57 to 68% (Itti and Koch, 2000; Kienzle et al, 2009). Even though low-level featural information, which defines the saliency map of an image or a scene, has been shown to correlate with the location of fixations in complex, natural scenes as well (Borji et al, 2013), it is unclear whether such a correlation reflects a causal relationship between stimulus salience and fixation selection in human observers
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