Do we know our visual preferences?

Humans differ in the amount of time they direct their gaze toward different types of stimuli. Individuals' preferences are known to be reliable and can predict various cognitive and affective processes. However, it remains unclear whether humans are aware of their visual gaze preferences and are able to report it. In this study, across three different tasks and without prior warning, participants were asked to estimate the amount of time they had looked at a certain visual content (e.g., faces or texts) at the end of each experiment. The findings show that people can report accurately their visual gaze preferences. The implications are discussed in the context of visual perception, metacognition, and the development of applied diagnostic tools based on eye tracking.

The promise of eye-tracking in the detection of concealed memories.

There is a need for validated, theory-driven methods for memory detection. We review how physiological, neurophysiological, and oculomotor measures can be utilized to reveal concealed memories. Recent advances and future directions are discussed in light of the potential of eye-tracking to improve detection efficiency and resolve problems in real-world settings.

Keep an eye on your belongings: Gaze dynamics toward familiar and unfamiliar objects.

Through a series of studies, we investigate how people direct gaze toward familiar and unfamiliar objects. When an observer tries to encode objects, gaze is first directed preferentially to the familiar object followed by a later prioritization of the unfamiliar ones. We demonstrate that the initial preference reflects prioritization of personally significant information and could be volitionally controlled. The latter prioritization of the unfamiliar objects is determined by the immediate goals due to the task and is less controllable. These findings imply that the mechanism that guides gaze is flexible, affected by both long-term significance and short-term goals and could be only partially controlled. This study has also imperative practical implications for detecting concealed information using eye tracking. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Search for the Unknown: Guidance of Visual Search in the Absence of an Active Template.

Can you efficiently look for something even without knowing what it looks like? According to theories of visual search, the answer is no: A template of the search target must be maintained in an active state to guide search for potential locations of the target. Here, we tested the need for an active template by assessing a case in which this template is improbable: the search for a familiar face among unfamiliar ones when the identity of the target face is unknown. Because people are familiar with hundreds of faces, an active guiding template seems unlikely in this case. Nevertheless, participants (35 Israelis and 33 Germans) were able to guide their search as long as extrafoveal processing of the target features was possible. These results challenge current theories of visual search by showing that guidance can rely on long-term memory and extrafoveal processing rather than on an active search template.

Not all fixations are created equal: The benefits of using ex-Gaussian modeling of fixation durations.

Various cognitive and perceptual factors have been shown to modulate the duration of fixations during visual exploration of complex scenes. The majority of these studies have only considered the mean of the distribution of fixation durations. However, this distribution is skewed to the right, so that an increase in the mean may be driven by a lengthening of all fixations (i.e., a right shift of the whole distribution) or only the relatively longer ones (i.e., a longer right tail of the distribution). To determine which factor is at play, the distribution can be modeled with an ex-Gaussian distribution, which is a convolution of a Gaussian and an exponential distribution. Here we demonstrate the usefulness of applying the ex-Gaussian model to empirical distributions of fixation durations and the reliability of its parameters across time. We demonstrate how the ex-Gaussian model had advantages over exclusive consideration of the mean, by showing that an increase in the mean can stem from specific changes in the components of the ex-Gaussian distribution. Specifically, the type of image leads to a change in the Gaussian component alone, indicating a right shift of the main mass of the distribution. By contrast, familiarity with the inspected image modifies the exponential component, and results in a more specific modulation of a subset of relatively long fixations. Hence, estimating the ex-Gaussian parameters may provide novel insights into the underlying processes that determine fixation duration and can contribute to the future development of process-based computational models of gaze behavior.

Been there, seen that, done that: Modification of visual exploration across repeated exposures.

The underlying factors that determine gaze position are a central topic in visual cognitive research. Traditionally, studies emphasized the interaction between the low-level properties of an image and gaze position. Later studies examined the influence of the semantic properties of an image. These studies explored gaze behavior during a single presentation, thus ignoring the impact of familiarity. Sparse evidence suggested that across repetitive exposures, gaze exploration attenuates but the correlation between gaze position and the low-level features of the image remains stable. However, these studies neglected two fundamental issues: (a) repeated scenes are displayed later in the testing session, such that exploration attenuation could be a result of lethargy, and (b) even if these effects are related to familiarity, are they based on a verbatim familiarity with the image, or on high-level familiarity with the gist of the scene? We investigated these issues by exposing participants to a sequence of images, some of them repeated across blocks. We found fewer, longer fixations as familiarity increased, along with shorter saccades and decreased gaze allocation towards semantically meaningful regions. These effects could not be ascribed to tonic fatigue, since they did not manifest for images that changed across blocks. Moreover, there was no attenuation of gaze behavior when participants observed a flipped version of the familiar images, suggesting that gist familiarity is not sufficient for eliciting these effects. These findings contribute to the literature on memory-guided gaze behavior and provide novel insights into the mechanism underlying the visual exploration of familiar environments.