Scan patterns during scene viewing predict individual differences in clinical traits in a normative sample.

Taylor R Hayes,John M Henderson

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0196654

Abstract

The relationship between viewer individual differences and gaze control has been largely neglected in the scene perception literature. Recently we have shown a robust association between individual differences in viewer cognitive capacity and scan patterns during scene viewing. These findings suggest other viewer individual differences may also be associated with scene gaze control. Here we expand our findings to quantify the relationship between individual differences in clinical traits and scene viewing behavior in a normative sample. The present study used Successor Representation Scanpath Analysis (SRSA) to quantify the strength of the association between individual differences in scan patterns during real-world scene viewing and individual differences in viewer attention-deficit disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and dyslexia scores. The SRSA results revealed individual differences in vertical scan patterns that explained more than half of the variance in attention-deficit scores, a third of the variance in autism quotient scores, and about a quarter of the variance in dyslexia scores. These results suggest that individual differences in attention-deficit disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and dyslexia scores are most strongly associated with vertical scanning behaviors when viewing real-world scenes. More importantly, our results suggest scene scan patterns have promise as potential diagnostic tools and provide insight into the types of vertical scan patterns that are most diagnostic.

Highlights

How we direct our attention in complex visual scenes has been studied since the pioneering eye tracking work of Buswell [1] and Yarbus [2]
Our findings revealed individual differences in scene scan patterns that explained more than 40% of the variance in viewer intelligence and working memory capacity, and more than a third of the variance in speed of processing [4]
We examined the association between individual differences in clinical traits and individual differences in real-world scene scan patterns in a normative sample

Summary

Introduction

How we direct our attention in complex visual scenes has been studied since the pioneering eye tracking work of Buswell [1] and Yarbus [2] Based on their findings, Buswell and Yarbus suggested that gaze control in complex visual scenes is a function of the current task goals, the properties of the scene stimulus, and the properties of the viewer [1, 2]. We [4] recently used an individual differences approach to establish an association between individual differences in viewer cognitive capacities and scan patterns during active scene viewing. Our findings revealed that only sequential eye movement patterns were capable of explaining significant variance in cognitive capacity, while other common fixation measures such as fixation duration, saccade amplitude, and fixation density could not. We seek to expand this work to individual differences in clinical traits

Methods

Results

Conclusion