Improving saliency models' predictions of the next fixation with humans' intrinsic cost of gaze shifts

Kadner, Florian; Thomas, Tobias; Hoppe, David; Rothkopf, Constantin A.

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2207.04250

Cited by 1 publication

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“…One participant was excluded due to only finishing a single session, and another dataset was discarded due to not following task instructions (<50% included trials in the saccade planning task). Twenty participants were included in the analyses for the saccade planning, and saccade decision tasks (age: M = 24.00, range: [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], 12 women, 8 men). The current sample size was comparable with previous work investigating saccade costs [23,30].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effort Drives Saccade Selection

Koevoet,

Van Zantwijk,

Naber

et al. 2024

Preprint

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What determines where to move the eyes? We recently showed that pupil size, a marker of noradrenaline release, reflects the effort associated with making a saccade (’saccade costs’). Here we demonstrate saccade costs to critically drive saccade selection: when choosing between any two saccade directions, the least costly direction was consistently preferred. Strikingly, this principle even held during search in natural scenes in two additional experiments. When increasing cognitive demand experimentally through an auditory counting task, participants made fewer saccades and especially cut costly directions. This suggests that the eye-movement system and other cognitive operations consume similar resources that are flexibly allocated among each other as cognitive demand changes. Together, we argue that eye-movement behavior is not only determined by physical saliency, goals, and selection history, but also by a qualitatively distinct and equally fundamental factor: effort.

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