ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Individual differences in visual salience vary along semantic dimensions.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 76 papers.
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Who cites it
76 citing papers in PubMed.
- Blinks are strategically coupled with head movements in unconstrained natural gaze behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Through the Looking Glass: Eye Tracking as a Cognitive Benchmark for Language-Model Semantics and Observer-Specific Semantic Alignment.Journal of eye movement research · 2026Review
- Active vision is linked to category selectivity in the individual brain.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Individual gaze is linked to neural tuning and perceptual skills.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Conceptual priorities shape individual gaze patterns during naturalistic visual attention.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Directing gaze to maximize surface color information from natural scenes.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The role of (observed) gaze behaviour in identity recognition.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- A Data-Driven Approach for Comparing Gaze Allocation Across Conditions.Journal of eye movement research · 2026Article
- Task-irrelevant human and robot head movements bias gaze in humans who follow them through virtual reality.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Detection of Idiosyncratic Gaze-Fingerprint Signatures in Humans.Psychological science · 2026Article
- The neural correlates of shared and individual experience.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Judging AI-generated paintings: art-education differences in source classification.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Where You Look Is What You Get: Individual Fixation Height Predicts Biases in Face Perception.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Detection, Inspection, Return: An Object-Based Classification and Metric of Fixations in Complex Scenes.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The similarity with a face presented in central vision improves face recognition in peripheral vision.Perception · 2025Article
- Individuating experience moderates the effect of implicit racial bias on eye movements to other race faces: a cross-cultural study.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Protracted development of gaze behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Distinct contributions of foveal and extrafoveal visual information to emotion judgments and gaze behavior for faces.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Approaches to understanding natural behavior.Journal of vision · 2025Review
16 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
What determines where we look? Theories of attentional guidance hold that image features and task demands govern fixation behavior, while differences between observers are interpreted as a "noise-ceiling" that strictly limits predictability of fixations. However, recent twin studies suggest a genetic basis of gaze-trace similarity for a given stimulus. This leads to the question of how individuals differ in their gaze behavior and what may explain these differences. Here, we investigated the fixations of >100 human adults freely viewing a large set of complex scenes containing thousands of semantically annotated objects. We found systematic individual differences in fixation frequencies along six semantic stimulus dimensions. These differences were large (>twofold) and highly stable across images and time. Surprisingly, they also held for first fixations directed toward each image, commonly interpreted as "bottom-up" visual salience. Their perceptual relevance was documented by a correlation between individual face salience and face recognition skills. The set of reliable individual salience dimensions and their covariance pattern replicated across samples from three different countries, suggesting they reflect fundamental biological mechanisms of attention. Our findings show stable individual differences in salience along a set of fundamental semantic dimensions and that these differences have meaningful perceptual implications. Visual salience reflects features of the observer as well as the image.
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