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Gaze Statistics of Natural Exploration

(a collaboration with E. Schneider, University Hospital of Munich supported by a Grant of the Bavaira California Technology Center (BaCaTeC))

The oculomotor system is the best-studied motor system in humans. Eye movements serve as an experimentally accessible correlate for the direction of spatial attention. As so far eye-movements could only be measured under laboratory conditions in head-fixed settings, primarily the effect of low-level, bottom-up visual features on spatial attention has been investigated. However, under natural exploration human attention is largely controlled by top-down factors. The experimental assessment of such realistic scenarios has so far not been possible. Therefore, a novel gaze-aligned, head-mounted camera system has been developed that measures and uses eye position as a signal continuously steer a pivotable scene camera in real-time to the center of gaze. In so doing, this "third eye" records what the user is looking at, even under natural head-free conditions. This puts us in the unique position to perform a series of novel experiments and to address the following questions, which had not been assessable with previous techniques: : To what extent does image statistics at the center of gaze differ in free exploration from head-fixed laboratory conditions? In particular, do current "bottom-up" models for human gaze allocation also hold during natural exploration.