scholarly journals Absorbing the gaze, scattering looks: Klimt’s distinctive style and its two-fold effect on the eye of the beholder

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Miscena ◽  
Jozsef Arato ◽  
Raphael Rosenberg

Among the most renowned painters of the early twentieth century, Gustav Klimt is often associated – by experts and laymen alike - with a distinctive style of representation: the visual juxtaposition of realistic features and flattened ornamental patterns. Art historical writing suggests that this juxtaposition allows a two-fold experience; the perception of both the realm of art and the realm of life. While Klimt adopted a variety of stylistic choices in his career, this one popularised his work and was hardly ever used by other artists. The following study was designed to observe whether Klimt’s distinctive style causes a specific behaviour of the viewer, at the level of eye-movements. Twenty-one portraits were shown to thirty viewers while their eye-movements were recorded. The pictures included artworks by Klimt in both his distinctive and non-distinctive styles, as well as other artists of the same historical period. The recorded data show that only Klimt’s distinctive paintings induce a specific eye-movement pattern with alternating longer (“absorbed”) and shorter (“scattered”) fixations. We therefore claim that there is a behavioural correspondence to what art historical interpretations have so far asserted: The perception of “Klimt’s style” can be described as two-fold also at a physiological level.

2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182199851
Author(s):  
Claudia Bonmassar ◽  
Francesco Pavani ◽  
Alessio Di Renzo ◽  
Cristina Caselli ◽  
Wieske van Zoest

Previous research on covert orienting to the periphery suggested that early profound deaf adults were less susceptible to uninformative gaze cues, though were equally or more affected by non-social arrow cues. The aim of the present work was to investigate whether spontaneous eye movement behaviour helps explain the reduced impact of the social cue in deaf adults. We tracked the gaze of 25 early profound deaf and 25 age-matched hearing observers performing a peripheral discrimination task with uninformative central cues (gaze vs. arrow), stimulus-onset asynchrony (250 vs. 750 ms) and cue-validity (valid vs. invalid) as within-subject factors. In both groups, the cue-effect on RT was comparable for the two cues, although deaf observers responded significantly slower than hearing controls. While deaf and hearing observers eye movement pattern looked similar when the cue was presented in isolation, deaf participants made significantly eye movements than hearing controls once the discrimination target appeared. Notably, further analysis of eye movements in the deaf group revealed that independent of cue-type, cue-validity affected saccade landing position, while latency was not modulated by these factors. Saccade landing position was also strongly related to the magnitude of the validity effect on RT, such that the greater the difference in saccade landing position between invalid and valid trials, the greater the difference in manual RT between invalid and valid trials. This work suggests that the contribution of overt selection in central cueing of attention is more prominent in deaf adults and helps determine the manual performance, irrespective of cue-type.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (15) ◽  
pp. 5178
Author(s):  
Sangbong Yoo ◽  
Seongmin Jeong ◽  
Seokyeon Kim ◽  
Yun Jang

Gaze movement and visual stimuli have been utilized to analyze human visual attention intuitively. Gaze behavior studies mainly show statistical analyses of eye movements and human visual attention. During these analyses, eye movement data and the saliency map are presented to the analysts as separate views or merged views. However, the analysts become frustrated when they need to memorize all of the separate views or when the eye movements obscure the saliency map in the merged views. Therefore, it is not easy to analyze how visual stimuli affect gaze movements since existing techniques focus excessively on the eye movement data. In this paper, we propose a novel visualization technique for analyzing gaze behavior using saliency features as visual clues to express the visual attention of an observer. The visual clues that represent visual attention are analyzed to reveal which saliency features are prominent for the visual stimulus analysis. We visualize the gaze data with the saliency features to interpret the visual attention. We analyze the gaze behavior with the proposed visualization to evaluate that our approach to embedding saliency features within the visualization supports us to understand the visual attention of an observer.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (06) ◽  
pp. 1950048
Author(s):  
Takenao Sugi ◽  
Ryosuke Baba ◽  
Yoshitaka Matsuda ◽  
Satoru Goto ◽  
Naruto Egashira ◽  
...  

People with serious movement disabilities due to neurodegenerative diseases have problems in their communication with others. Considerable numbers of communication aid systems have been developed in the past. Especially, some of the systems driven by eye movements are thought to be effective for such people. Electrooculographic (EOG) signal reflects the eye movement and the specific pattern of eye movement can be seen in EOG signals. This paper proposes a communication aid system by extracting the features of EOG. The system consists of a computer, analog-to-digital converter, biological amplifier and two monitors. Two monitors, one for a system user and the other for other people, display the same information. Five items are presented in the monitor, and a user selects those items according to the situation in the communication. Selection of the items is done by combining three eye movements: gaze at left, gaze at right and successive blinks. Basic concept of the communication aid system was designed by taking into account the current state of a subject’s movement disability. Then, the design of a screen and the algorithm for detecting eye movement pattern from EOG were determined by using the data of normal healthy subjects. The system worked almost perfectly for normal healthy subjects. Then, the developed system was operated by a subject with serious movement disability. Parts of the system operation were regarded as satisfactory level, and some miss-operation were also seen.


Perception ◽  
10.1068/p3470 ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (7) ◽  
pp. 793-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas J Wade ◽  
Benjamin W Tatler ◽  
Dieter Heller

Dodge, in 1916, suggested that the French term ‘saccade’ should be used for describing the rapid movements of the eyes that occur while reading. Previously he had referred to these as type I movements. Javal had used the term ‘saccade’ in 1879, when describing experiments conducted in his laboratory by Lamare. Accordingly, Javal has been rightly credited with assigning the term to rapid eye movements. In English these rapid rotations had been called jerks, and they had been observed and measured before Lamare's studies of reading. Rapid sweeps of the eyes occur as one phase of nystagmus; they were observed by Wells in 1792 who used an afterimage technique, and they were illustrated by Crum Brown in 1878. Afterimages were used in nineteenth-century research on eye movements and eye position; they were also employed by Hering in 1879, to ascertain how the eyes moved during reading. In the previous year, Javal had employed afterimages in his investigations of reading, but this was to demonstrate that the eyes moved horizontally rather than vertically. Hering's and Lamare's auditory method established the discontinuous nature of eye movements during reading, and the photographic methods introduced by Dodge and others in the early twentieth century enabled their characteristics to be determined with greater accuracy.


Vision ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Julie Royo ◽  
Fabrice Arcizet ◽  
Patrick Cavanagh ◽  
Pierre Pouget

We introduce a blind spot method to create image changes contingent on eye movements. One challenge of eye movement research is triggering display changes contingent on gaze. The eye-tracking system must capture the image of the eye, discover and track the pupil and corneal reflections to estimate the gaze position, and then transfer this data to the computer that updates the display. All of these steps introduce delays that are often difficult to predict. To avoid these issues, we describe a simple blind spot method to generate gaze contingent display manipulations without any eye-tracking system and/or display controls.


1977 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Schlag-Rey ◽  
J. Schlag

1. Visual responses and eye movement-related activities were studied in single neurons of the thalamic internal medullary lamina (IML) of alert cats. The animals faced a tangent screen on which stationary or moving spots of light were presented. Of 95 units, 26% discharged in relation to photic stimuli but not eye movement, 6% in relation to eye movement but not photic stimuli, and 68% in relation to both. These units were intermixed in the same region. 2. Visual responses varied from transient to sustained. IML units were not found particularly sensitive to stimulus movement when the eyes were fixed. Strong and consistent responses could be elicited by extremely dim and weakly contrasted stationary stimuli (e.g.) 3.4 mcd/m2, 2.6% of illumination background) binocularly viewed. Receptive fields (from 250 to 800 deg2) were determined, in absence of eye movements, by computing the position of effective stimuli relative to the point of fixation of the gaze. An area of greatest responsiveness in the receptive field of most units could be detected on the basis of either higher probability of response, minimum latency, greater number of spikes in initial transient burst, or stronger sustained activity. Whole fields or their areas of greatest responsiveness were located on the side toward which saccades were accompanied by increased firing of the unit. 3. On trials in which a delay occurred between stimulus presentation and the cat's targeting saccade, the majority of the units studied changed their activity twice: after the stimulus and before the eye movement. In 16 units, the presaccadic activation occurred only with targeting, not with spontaneous saccades. 4. These results suggest that cells in the IML region of the cat play a significant role in the control of visually elicited eye movements. The resemblance of these cells to the monkey's tectual cells is discussed and hypotheses are proposed a) to relate the receptive field characteristics to the targeting operation, and b) to account for the double activation--sensory and motor--of many IML cells.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorit Taragin ◽  
David Tzuriel ◽  
Eli Vakil

The effects of gender, strategy and task characteristics on children's mental rotation (MR) behavioral measures and eye movements were studied. Eye movements reflect thinking pattern and assist understanding mental rotation performance. Eighty-three fourth-grade children (44 boys and 39 girls) were administered the Computerized Windows Mental Rotation test (CWMR) while having their eye movements monitored and completed a Strategy Self-Report (global/local/combined) and a Spatial Span (WM) subtest. Difficulty level affected performance and was reflected in a different eye movement pattern. Boys were more accurate than girls, but they did not differ in their eye movement pattern. Eye movement pattern was related to strategy, accuracy and reaction time, revealing that the global and combined strategy were more effective compared with local strategy. WM was found to correlate with accuracy at the easy level of the test. The usage of eye movement measures assists in elaborating our knowledge regarding MR performance among children and enable a wider understanding regarding the interaction between gender, strategy and difficulty level. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hoo Keat Wong ◽  
Ian D. Stephen

Human behaviour is not only influenced by the physical presence of others, but also implied social presence. According to Risko and Kingstone (2011), an eye tracker can represent an implied social presence which could influence individuals’ gaze behaviour. This study examines the impact of awareness of being eye-tracked on eye movement behaviour in a laboratory setting.  During a classic yes/no face recognition task, participants were made to believe that their eye movements were recorded (or not recorded) by eye trackers. Their looking patterns with and without the awareness of being eye-tracked were compared while perceiving social (faces, faces-and-bodies) and non-social (inanimate objects) video stimuli. Area-of-interest (AOI) analysis revealed that misinformed participants (who were not aware that their eye movements were being recorded) looked more at the body (chest and waist) compared to informed participants (who believed they were being eye-tracked), whereas informed participants fixated longer on the mouth and shorter on the eyes of female models than misinformed participants did. These findings highlight the potential impact of an awareness of being eye tracked on one’s eye movement pattern when perceiving a social stimulus. We therefore suggest that even within laboratory settings an eye tracker may function as an implied social presence that leads individuals to modify their eye movement behaviour according to socially-derived inhibitory norms.


Author(s):  
Konstantin Frank ◽  
Luca Schuster ◽  
Michael Alfertshofer ◽  
Sebastian Felix Baumbach ◽  
Viktoria Herterich ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic facecovers have become a common sight. The effect of facecovers on the gaze when looking at faces has not yet been assessed. Objectives The aim of the present study was to investigate any potential differences in eye movement pattern in observers exposed to images showing a face without and with a facecover to identify if there is truly a change of gaze when identifying (masked) facial features. Methods The eye movement of 64 study participants (28 males and 36 females) with a mean [standard deviation] age of 31.84 [9.0] years was analyzed in this cross-sectional observational study. Eye movement analysis was conducted based on positional changes of eye features within an x- and y-coordinate system while two images (face without/with facecover) were displayed for 8 seconds. Results The results of this study revealed that the sequence of focusing on facial regions was not altered when wearing a facecover and followed the sequence: perioral, nose, periorbital. Wearing a facecover significantly increased the time spent focusing on the periorbital region and also increased the number of repeated eye fixations during the 8-second visual stimulus presentation. No statistically significant differences were observed between male and female participants in their eye movement pattern across all investigated variables (P > 0.433). Conclusions The altered eye movement pattern caused by wearing facecoverings that this study has revealed suggests that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, aesthetic practitioners might consider developing marketing and treatment strategies that principally target the periorbital area.


Author(s):  
Agnes Wong

Vergence eye movements shift the gaze point between near and far, such that the image of a target is maintained simultaneously on both foveae. Unlike other eye movement systems, vergence movements are disjunctive, meaning that the eyes move in opposite directions. To move from a far to a near target, the eyes converge (i.e., rotate toward the nose) so that the lines of sight of the two eyes intersect at the target. To aim at a target farther away, the eyes diverge (i.e., rotate toward the temples). When the target is located at optical infinity, the lines of sight are parallel. During deep sleep, deep anesthesia, and coma, the eyes diverge beyond parallel, indicating that eye alignment is normally actively maintained by the brain because the orbits, in which the eyeballs are located, are divergent. The vergence system is believed to be relatively new evolutionarily. Just as a new version of computer software tends to have bugs, perhaps it is for this reason that vergence is the last of the eye movement systems to reach full development in children, that it is often the first system to be affected by fatigue, alcohol, and other drugs, and that defective vergence is a common cause of strabismus and diplopia. Vergence eye movements are very slow, lasting 1 sec or longer. One reason for this may be that vergence, unlike saccades, is driven by visual feedback, which normally takes at least 80 msec. Another reason may be that the speed of vergence movements is limited by how fast the lenses change shape (accommodation) and how fast the pupils constrict. There may simply be no advantage for vergence to take place quickly and then wait for the lenses and pupils to catch up. The triad of convergence, accommodation, and pupillary constriction constitutes the near triad. The two most important stimuli for vergence are retinal image blur and retinal disparity. If the retinal image of an object is blurred, the target is either too near or too far away.


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