Switch from ambient to focal processing mode explains the dynamics of free viewing eye movements

Previous studies have reported that humans employ ambient and focal modes of visual exploration while they freely view natural scenes. These two modes have been characterized based on eye movement parameters such as saccade amplitude and fixation duration, but not by any visual features of the viewed scenes. Here we propose a new characterization of eye movements during free viewing based on how eyes are moved from and to objects in a visual scene. We applied this characterization to data obtained from freely-viewing macaque monkeys. We show that the analysis based on this characterization gives a direct indication of a behavioral shift from ambient to focal processing mode along the course of free viewing exploration. We further propose a stochastic model of saccade sequence generation incorporating a switch between the two processing modes, which quantitatively reproduces the behavioral features observed in the data.

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