The contribution of low-level features at the centre of gaze to saccade target selection

The contribution of low-level features at the centre of gaze to saccade target selection

Michael Dorr, Karl Gegenfurtner, and Erhardt Barth: Vision Research 49 (2009) 2918-2926

Does it matter what observers are looking at right now to determine where they will look next? We recorded eye movements and computed colour, local orientation, motion, and geometrical invariants on dynamic natural scenes.
The distributions of differences between features at successive fixations were compared with those from random scanpaths of varying similarity to natural scanpaths. Although distributions show significant differences, these feature correlations are mainly due to spatio-temporal correlations in natural scenes and a target selection bias, e.g. towards moving objects. Our results indicate that low-level features at fixation contribute little to the choice of the next saccade target.

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