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The categories, frequencies, and stability of idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns to faces.

ABSTRACT: The spatial pattern of eye-movements to faces considered typical for neurologically healthy individuals is a roughly T-shaped distribution over the internal facial features with peak fixation density tending toward the left eye (observer's perspective). However, recent studies indicate that striking deviations from this classic pattern are common within the population and are highly stable over time. The classic pattern actually reflects the average of these various idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns across individuals. The natural categories and respective frequencies of different types of idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns have not been specifically investigated before, so here we analyzed the spatial patterns of eye-movements for 48 participants to estimate the frequency of different kinds of individual eye-movement patterns to faces in the normal healthy population. Four natural clusters were discovered such that approximately 25% of our participants' fixation density peaks clustered over the left eye region (observer's perspective), 23% over the right eye-region, 31% over the nasion/bridge region of the nose, and 20% over the region spanning the nose, philthrum, and upper lips. We did not find any relationship between particular idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns and recognition performance. Individuals' eye-movement patterns early in a trial were more stereotyped than later ones and idiosyncratic fixation patterns evolved with time into a trial. Finally, while face inversion strongly modulated eye-movement patterns, individual patterns did not become less distinct for inverted compared to upright faces. Group-averaged fixation patterns do not represent individual patterns well, so exploration of such individual patterns is of value for future studies of visual cognition.

SUBMITTER: Arizpe J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5474224 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The categories, frequencies, and stability of idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns to faces.

Arizpe Joseph J Walsh Vincent V Yovel Galit G Baker Chris I CI

Vision research 20161218

The spatial pattern of eye-movements to faces considered typical for neurologically healthy individuals is a roughly T-shaped distribution over the internal facial features with peak fixation density tending toward the left eye (observer's perspective). However, recent studies indicate that striking deviations from this classic pattern are common within the population and are highly stable over time. The classic pattern actually reflects the average of these various idiosyncratic eye-movement pa ...[more]

PMID: 27940212

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Project description:Eye-movement patterns are often utilized in studies of visual perception as indices of the specific information extracted to efficiently process a given stimulus during a given task. Our prior work, however, revealed that not only the stimulus and task influence eye-movements, but that visuomotor (start position) factors also robustly and characteristically influence eye-movement patterns to faces (Arizpe et al., 2012). Here we manipulated lateral starting side and distance from the midline of face and line-symmetrical control (butterfly) stimuli in order to further investigate the nature and generality of such visuomotor influences. First we found that increasing starting distance from midline (4°, 8°, 12°, and 16° visual angle) strongly and proportionately increased the distance of the first ordinal fixation from midline. We did not find influences of starting distance on subsequent fixations, however, suggesting that eye-movement plans are not strongly affected by starting distance following an initial orienting fixation. Further, we replicated our prior effect of starting side (left, right) to induce a spatially contralateral tendency of fixations after the first ordinal fixation. However, we also established that these visuomotor influences did not depend upon the predictability of the location of the upcoming stimulus, and were present not only for face stimuli but also for our control stimulus category (butterflies). We found a correspondence in overall left-lateralized fixation tendency between faces and butterflies. Finally, for faces, we found a relationship between left starting side (right sided fixation pattern tendency) and increased recognition performance, which likely reflects a cortical right hemisphere (left visual hemifield) advantage for face perception. These results further indicate the importance of considering and controlling for visuomotor influences in the design, analysis, and interpretation of eye-movement studies.

Project description:INTRODUCTION:Eye movements and spatial attention are closely related, and eye-tracking can provide valuable information in research on visual attention. We investigated the pathology of overt attention in right hemisphere (RH) stroke patients differing in their severity of neglect symptoms by using eye-tracking during a dynamic attention task. METHODS:Eye movements were recorded in 26 RH stroke patients (13 with and 13 without unilateral spatial neglect, and a matched group of 26 healthy controls during a Multiple Object Tracking task. We assessed the frequency and spatial distributions of fixations, as well as frequencies of eye movements to the left and to the right side of visual space so as to investigate individuals' efficiency of visual processing, distribution of attentional processing resources, and oculomotoric orienting mechanisms. RESULTS:Both patient groups showed increased fixation frequencies compared to controls. A spatial bias was found in neglect patients' fixation distribution, depending on neglect severity (indexed by scores on the Behavioral Inattention Test). Patients with more severe neglect had more fixations within the right field, while patients with less severe neglect had more fixations within their left field. Eye movement frequencies were dependent on direction in the neglect patient group, as they made more eye movements toward the right than toward the left. CONCLUSION:The patient groups' higher fixation rates suggest that patients are generally less efficient in visual processing. The spatial bias in fixation distribution, dependent on neglect severity, suggested that patients with less severe neglect were able to use compensational mechanisms in their contralesional space. The observed relation between eye movement rates and directions observed in neglect patients provides a measure of the degree of difficulty these patients may encounter during dynamic situations in daily life and supports the idea that directional oculomotor hypokinesia may be a relevant component in this syndrome.

Dataset Information

The categories, frequencies, and stability of idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns to faces.

Publications

The categories, frequencies, and stability of idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns to faces.

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