IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0139379.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Temporal Structure of Human Gaze Dynamics Is Invariant During Free Viewing

Author

Listed:
  • Colleen A Marlow
  • Indre V Viskontas
  • Alisa Matlin
  • Cooper Boydston
  • Adam Boxer
  • Richard P Taylor

Abstract

We investigate the dynamic structure of human gaze and present an experimental study of the frequency components of the change in gaze position over time during free viewing of computer-generated fractal images. We show that changes in gaze position are scale-invariant in time with statistical properties that are characteristic of a random walk process. We quantify and track changes in the temporal structure using a well-defined scaling parameter called the Hurst exponent, H. We find H is robust regardless of the spatial complexity generated by the fractal images. In addition, we find the Hurst exponent is invariant across all participants, including those with distinct changes to higher order visual processes due to neural degeneration. The value we find for H of 0.57 shows that the gaze dynamics during free viewing of fractal images are consistent with a random walk process with persistent movements. Our research suggests the human visual system may have a common strategy that drives the dynamics of human gaze during exploration.

Suggested Citation

  • Colleen A Marlow & Indre V Viskontas & Alisa Matlin & Cooper Boydston & Adam Boxer & Richard P Taylor, 2015. "Temporal Structure of Human Gaze Dynamics Is Invariant During Free Viewing," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(9), pages 1-13, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0139379
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0139379
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0139379
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0139379&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0139379?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Boccignone, Giuseppe & Ferraro, Mario, 2004. "Modelling gaze shift as a constrained random walk," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 331(1), pages 207-218.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tommaso Costa & Giuseppe Boccignone & Franco Cauda & Mario Ferraro, 2016. "The Foraging Brain: Evidence of Lévy Dynamics in Brain Networks," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(9), pages 1-16, September.
    2. Richard P. Taylor, 2021. "The Potential of Biophilic Fractal Designs to Promote Health and Performance: A Review of Experiments and Applications," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(2), pages 1-24, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jerzy Grobelny & Rafal Michalski & Rafal Weron, 2015. "Is Human Visual Activity in Simple Human-Computer Interaction Search Tasks a Lévy Flight?," WORking papers in Management Science (WORMS) WORMS/15/04, Department of Operations Research and Business Intelligence, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology.
    2. Tommaso Costa & Giuseppe Boccignone & Franco Cauda & Mario Ferraro, 2016. "The Foraging Brain: Evidence of Lévy Dynamics in Brain Networks," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(9), pages 1-16, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0139379. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.