Objects guide human gaze behavior in dynamic real-world scenes
Authors: Roth Nicolas , Rolfs Martin , Hellwich Olaf , Obermayer Klaus 
Published: March 2023

The complexity of natural scenes makes it challenging to experimentally study the mechanisms behind human gaze behavior when viewing dynamic environments. Historically, eye movements were believed to be driven primarily by space-based attention towards locations with salient features. Increasing evidence suggests, however, that visual attention does not select locations with high saliency but operates on attentional units given by the objects in the scene. We present a new computational framework to investigate the importance of objects for attentional guidance. This framework is designed to simulate realistic scanpaths for dynamic real-world scenes, including saccade timing and smooth pursuit behavior. Individual model components are based on psychophysically uncovered mechanisms of visual attention and saccadic decision-making. All mechanisms are implemented in a modular fashion with a small number of well-interpretable parameters. To systematically analyze the importance of objects in guiding gaze behavior, we implemented five different models within this framework: two purely spatial models, where one is based on low-level saliency and one on high-level saliency, two object-based models, with one incorporating low-level saliency for each object and the other one not using any saliency information, and a mixed model with object-based attention and selection but space-based inhibition of return. We optimized each model’s parameters to reproduce the saccade amplitude and fixation duration distributions of human scanpaths using evolutionary algorithms. We compared model performance with respect to spatial and temporal fixation behavior, including the proportion of fixations exploring the background, as well as detecting, inspecting, and returning to objects. A model with object-based attention and inhibition, which uses saliency information to prioritize between objects for saccadic selection, leads to scanpath statistics with the highest similarity to the human data. This demonstrates that scanpath models benefit from object-based attention and selection, suggesting that object-level attentional units play an important role in guiding attentional processing.

Author summary

There has long been an interest in understanding how we decide when and where to move our eyes, and psychophysical experiments have uncovered many underlying mechanisms. Under controlled laboratory conditions, objects in the scene play an important role in guiding our attention. Due to the visual complexity of the world around us, however, it is hard to assess experimentally how objects influence eye movements when observing dynamic real-world scenes. Computational models have proved to be a powerful tool for investigating visual attention, but existing models are either only applicable to images or restricted to predicting where humans look on average. Here, we present a computational framework for simulating where and when humans decide to move their eyes when observing dynamic real-world scenes. Using our framework, we can assess the influence of objects on the model predictions. We find that including object-based attention in the modeling increases the resemblance of simulated eye movements to human gaze behavior, showing that objects play indeed an important role in guiding our gaze when exploring the world around us. We hope that the availability of this framework encourages more research on attention in dynamic real-world scenes.