Eye movements in Multiple Object Tracking systematically lagging behind the scene content

J Lukavsky

Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic, Czech Republic
Contact: lukavsky@praha.psu.cas.cz

In the current experiment I investigated whether the eye movements during Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) are based on the object positions in future or rather in past. Importantly this can be done without assumptions about specific participants’ strategies. I recorded eye movements in MOT with 60 trials (N=20). Participants tracked 4 of 8 objects for 10 seconds (speed 5deg/s). For every subject five trials were repeated four times each during the experiment and four times more in reversed direction. For each repeating trial I used Normalized Scanpath Saliency measure adapted for dynamic scenes to compare the eye movements between trials presented in forward and backward direction. I varied the latency between -250 ms (prediction) and +250 ms (lag) and looked for the local maximum (90% of comparisons had maxima within the inspected range). The systematical lag was present in each participant (mean 99ms; 95%CI 81- 116 ms). The results are discussed in the context of lagging and lag-reducing processes [Howard, et al. (2011). Vision Research, 51(17), 1907–1919.].

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