11:00 - 12:30
Parallel sessions 8
11:00 - 12:30
Room: HSZ - N1
Chair/s:
Philine Margarete Baumert, Celina Kullmann
Oculomotor research has a long tradition in experimental psychology. In humans, visual input provides the highest amount of information per time in comparison to other senses, and about 50% of the neocortex reacts to visual stimuli. With today’s technology, eye movements are easy to access, do not rely on participants’ subjective reports, and usually do not require complicated task instructions. Their neural basis, both neurochemical and neurophysiological, has been studied extensively. Therefore, they can provide insights into health and disease, numerous aspects of cognition, and can be viewed as an estimate of brain functioning. Despite the field’s long history, new methods and technologies open up new possibilities and questions, as well as new pathways to solving well-known problems. Here, we aim to present current methods, approaches, and directions in the field of oculomotor research in experimental psychology. First, Celina Kullmann will introduce the method of latent state-trait modelling and resulting reliability as well as trait and state components of smooth pursuit eye movements. Next, Paul Schmitthäuser will speak on how a new experimental paradigm makes use of saccadic inhibition to assess oculomotor planning and attentional priority. Keaton Dahl will contribute new insights into fixational eye movements and how specific statistical methods can be applied to them in face recognition tasks. Then, Philine Baumert will present findings on how lorazepam influences microsaccades during fixational and exploratory gaze behavior. As a final contribution, Alexander Goettker will shed light on the statistics of natural gaze behavior using mobile recordings and how they compare to laboratory-gained estimates. Overall, the symposium will demonstrate new perspectives as well as recent progress in exciting areas of oculomotor research, underscoring its continued relevance to the field of experimental psychology.
Submission 108
The Statistics of Natural Gaze Behavior in Active Everyday Tasks
SymposiumTalk-05
Presented by: Alexander Goettker
Alexander Goettker 1, Svea Kürten 1, Mary Hayhoe 2
1 University of Giessen, Germany
2 The University of Texas, Austin, United States
Many studies trying to understand natural gaze movements use the presentation of naturalistic images on a computer screen with restrained head movements. However, in the natural world, we often use a combination of eye and head movements to shift our gaze. Here we employ state-of-the-art mobile recording techniques to describe the statistics of eye and head movements during active, everyday tasks and compare them to screen-based tasks. The same group of participants completed three different tasks: (1) free-viewing of naturalistic images on a screen, (2) block building, and (3) copying of an image. Our results provide three key insights. First, an automated movement labeling pipeline allowed us to describe the statistics of natural eye and head movements in active real-world tasks. Notably, a substantial proportion of gaze fixations (around 30%) happen while the head is moving and the gaze is stabilized via the vestibular-ocular reflex. Second, we observed novel gaze strategies that are not observed in the screen-based task. For example, there seems to be a strategic combination of blinks and large head movements. Third, we leveraged reliable individual differences in average gaze statistics (e.g., saccade rate) across tasks to compute the possible level of generalization from the screen to the real world. There were only limited relationships between the screen-based task and the natural tasks, indicating that the passive free-viewing screen-based task is not a good descriptor of active real-world gaze behavior. Together, our results highlight the need to study natural behavior in vivo.