Adult gaze takes decades to develop

New Publication by Benjamin de Haas and Marcel Linka in Nature Human Behaviour, reported on by the Giessener Anzeiger newspaper

How does the way we look at scenes develop? We know from previous studies that the way 5-year olds look at everyday scenes is different from the way adults look at them. For instance, kids look less at text items, like a street sign and more towards faces. But how long does it take for the adult way to look at scenes to develop? This question is hard to answer, because we don't know which age groups to compare without knowing the answer to our question in the first place. So Marcel and Ben collected data from all age groups. They collaborated with Mathematikum, which helped to build an 'eyetracking booth' and hosted it for more than a year. Thankfully, thousands of visitors took part in our experiment and had their gaze tracked. The resulting dataset is by far the largest of its kind. It allows the continues comparison of gaze behaviour between age groups ranging from 5-55 years. And this type of comparison came with surprises: Gaze turns out to develop for decades - much longer than previously assumed. Even basic, spatial biases, like the tendency to make more horizontal than vertical eye movements develop all the way into teenage. High level biases like the tendency to look at text can even develop into the twenties! This may mean that experience plays a much bigger role for eye movements than current models assume. Marcel and Ben just published this finding - and made the title page of Nature Human Behaviour.

The full paper can be found here, data & code here.

The report from the Giessener Anzeiger can be found here.