The art of gaze guidance

Abstract

An ongoing challenge in scene perception is identifying the factors that influence how we explore our visual world. By using multiple versions of paintings as a tool to control for high-level influences, we show that variation in the visual details of a painting causes differences in observers' gaze despite constant task and content. Further, we show that by switching locations of highly salient regions through textural manipulation, a corresponding switch in eye movement patterns is observed. Our results present the finding that salient regions and gaze behavior are not simply correlated; variation in saliency through textural differences causes an observer to direct their viewing accordingly. This work demonstrates the direct contribution of low-level factors in visual exploration by showing that examination of a scene, even for aesthetic purposes, can be easily manipulated by altering the low-level properties and hence, the saliency of the scene.