What people look at most reflects their brains’ specialization

While people explore the environment around them, their eyes constantly move between different objects, faces and other specific segments of a visual scene. This dynamic process allows them to prioritize visual information relevant to a task at hand or that they find more interesting, ignoring details or items in their surroundings that they deem less important.

Short pauses on a specific part of a visual scene are known as fixations. Past studies have shown that different people can exhibit distinct fixation patterns. For instance, some people might spend more time looking at faces, while others might pause longer on written words or specific types of objects.

Researchers at Justus-Liebig University Giessen and the Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the relationship between what people tend to gaze at most and how their brains represent visual information. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that where people naturally direct their gaze reflects how their individual brains encode different types of visual stimuli.

“Individuals reliably differ in how they look at complex visual scenes, with the most prominent variation in their propensity to fixate on faces and text,” Diana Kollenda, Elaheh Akbari and their colleagues wrote in their paper. “We tested the hypothesis that these differences in gaze are linked to representational properties of the individual visual system in 61 adults.”

Tracking people’s gaze tendencies

To explore the link between people’s fixation patterns and how their brains represent visual information, the researchers recruited 61 adults and asked them to complete a basic visual task. This task required them to observe complex natural scenes.

While the study participants looked at these scenes, the researchers tracked their gaze using eye-tracking technology. During a separate experiment, they also used an imaging technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to collect scans of the participants’ brains while they were shown images of faces, words or other visual stimuli.

“Eye-tracking captured each observer’s characteristic gaze tendencies during naturalistic scene viewing, and independent fMRI recorded category-selective responses to faces, words and other stimuli when participants were instructed to fixate centrally,” wrote Kollenda and her colleagues. “We find that the propensity to fixate faces or text goes along with enhanced distinctiveness and enlarged functional regions of corresponding categorical representations in the ventral stream. These, in turn, predicted performance on reading and face-recognition tasks.”

Individual differences in the encoding of different stimuli

Kollenda and her colleagues found that participants exhibited different fixation patterns, with some spontaneously gazing more at faces and others at words. These distinct fixation patterns were associated with differences in the size and distinctiveness of specific brain regions.

Regions known to play a role in processing faces appeared to be larger and more distinctive in the brains of people who looked more frequently at faces. On the other hand, those who naturally tended to gaze more at text appeared to have larger functional regions specialized in processing written words.

Interestingly, the researchers also found that participants who looked more at faces performed significantly better on face-recognition tasks. In contrast, those who fixated more on text achieved better results on reading tasks.

“Thus, active vision appears linked to the precision of category-selective encoding and corresponding neural resources in the individual brain,” wrote the authors.

This recent study suggests that distinct fixation patterns are often accompanied by differences in the encoding of specific visual stimuli. If the team’s findings are validated in further studies, they could eventually help improve understanding of the underpinnings of individual differences in reading, face perception, visual processing and learning.

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Ingrid Fadelli

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