The scanpath theory: its definitions and later developments

Abstract

The scanpath theory was defined in 1971 by David Noton and Lawrence Stark in two articles that appeared in Science 1 and Scientific American 2 , and since then it has been considered one of the most influential theory of vision and eye movements. The scanpath theory explains the vision process in a top-down fashion by proposing that an internal cognitive representation controls not only the visual perception but also the related mechanism of active looking eye movements. Evidence supporting the scanpath theory comes from experiments showing the repetitive and idiosyncratic nature of eye movements during experiments with ambiguous figures, visual imagery and dynamic scenes. Similarity metrics were defined in our analysis procedures to quantitatively compare and measure the sequence of eye fixations in different experimental conditions. More recent scanpath experiments performed using different motor read-out systems have served to better understand the structure of the visual image representation in the brain and the presence of several levels of binding. A special emphasis must be given to the role of bottom-up conspicuity elaboration in the control of the scanpath sequence and interconnection of conspicuity with such higher level cognitive representations.