How body postures affect gaze control in scene viewing under specific task conditions.

Gaze movements during visual exploration of natural scenes are typically investigated with the static picture viewing paradigm in the laboratory. While this paradigm is attractive for its highly controlled conditions, limitations in the generalizability of the resulting findings to more natural viewing behavior have been raised frequently. Here, we address the combined influences of body posture and viewing task on gaze behavior with the static picture viewing paradigm under free viewing as a baseline condition.

A dynamical scan-path model for task-dependence during scene viewing.

In real-world scene perception, human observers generate sequences of fixations to move image patches into the high-acuity center of the visual field. Models of visual attention developed over the last 25 years aim to predict two-dimensional probabilities of gaze positions for a given image via saliency maps. Recently, progress has been made on models for the generation of scan paths under the constraints of saliency as well as attentional and oculomotor restrictions.

Task-dependence in scene perception: Head unrestrained viewing using mobile eye-tracking.

Real-world scene perception is typically studied in the laboratory using static picture viewing with restrained head position. Consequently, the transfer of results obtained in this paradigm to real-word scenarios has been questioned. The advancement of mobile eye-trackers and the progress in image processing, however, permit a more natural experimental setup that, at the same time, maintains the high experimental control from the standard laboratory setting.