Variability of eye movements when viewing dynamic natural scenes.

By Michael Dorr, Thomas Martinetz, Karl R. Gegenfurtner, Erhardt Barth. Journal of Vision, 2010

472 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How similar are the eye movement patterns of different subjects when free viewing dynamic natural scenes? We collected a large database of eye movements from 54 subjects on 18 high-resolution videos of outdoor scenes and measured their variability using the Normalized Scanpath Saliency, which we extended to the temporal domain. Even though up to about 80% of subjects looked at the same image region in some video parts, variability usually was much greater. Eye movements on natural movies were then compared with eye movements in several control conditions. "Stop-motion" movies had almost identical semantic content as the original videos but lacked continuous motion. Hollywood action movie trailers were used to probe the upper limit of eye movement coherence that can be achieved by deliberate camera work, scene cuts, etc. In a "repetitive" condition, subjects viewed the same movies ten times each over the course of 2 days. Results show several systematic differences between conditions both for general eye movement parameters such as saccade amplitude and fixation duration and for eye movement variability. Most importantly, eye movements on static images are initially driven by stimulus onset effects and later, more so than on continuous videos, by subject-specific idiosyncrasies; eye movements on Hollywood movies are significantly more coherent than those on natural movies. We conclude that the stimuli types often used in laboratory experiments, static images and professionally cut material, are not very representative of natural viewing behavior. All stimuli and gaze data are publicly available at http://www.inb.uni-luebeck.de/tools-demos/gaze.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31f6fccd1bed7dbb4f63a3c22ec7752ae97f0dba

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Citations in the corpus

Detecting Engagement in Egocentric Video (2016, background): “By contrast, clips in popular third-person saliency datasets are typically 20 seconds [23] to 2 minutes [42], since the interest is in gauging instantaneous gaze reactions.”
Space-Variant Descriptor Sampling for Action Recognition Based on Saliency and Eye Movements (2012, background): “[19,24,18]): eye movements on professionally-captured and edited Hollywood videos are highly centered.”
Salient object detection: A survey (2014, background): “er of objects [146]. Fixation prediction models have been used to predict where people look during free-viewing of static natural scenes (e.g., [17], [19], [20], [147] or dynamic scenes/vidoes (e.g., [148]–[150]) by employing motion, ﬂicker, optical ﬂow (e.g., [151]), or spatiotemporal interest poin”
Review of Eye Tracking Metrics Involved in Emotional and Cognitive Processes (2021, background): “It has been reported that when viewing natural movies, observers tend to make both more small and more large saccades (with amplitudes of less than 5 and more than 10 degrees, respectively) on natural movies, whereas saccades of intermediate amplitudes are less frequent than in Hollywood action movi”