In developmental research, differences in cognition and perception during image viewing can result in varied processing and subsequent memory of scene elements. Additionally, scan paths during scene perception may provide insights into pattern completion for partially incomplete images. However, the extent to which eye-gaze patterns predict subsequent memory and how these patterns differ between children and adults remains unclear.

To investigate this, we measured the gaze fixations while children (aged 6 to 11) and young adults (aged 19 to 30) viewed 60 naturalistic images. Later, gaze fixations were measured during image reinstatement on the blank screen after being cued with partially occluded images.

Using the representational similarity analysis of the fixation-based heat maps, we observed that adults exhibited higher encoding-retrieval eye-gaze reinstatement than children, suggesting a prolonged developmental trajectory for eye-gaze reinstatement. It correlated with greater memory accuracy, reflecting the consolidation of scan paths.

Further, we analyzed the differences between the scan paths in children and adults using MultiMatch—a metric measuring the similarity between scan paths across multiple dimensions. We observed consistent differences between the scan paths made by adults and children.

We also used various state-of-the-art AI models to uncover further if they can preferentially predict the scanpaths of an age group. We aim to thoroughly investigate and discuss our findings, and their implications for both, cognitive neuroscience as well as for building foveation-based AI models.