Orienting during gaze guidance in a letter-identification task

• Main Authors: Christoph Rasche, Karl Gegenfurtner
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bern Open Publishing 2010-10-01
• Series: Journal of Eye Movement Research
• Subjects: saccadic constant error; attentional shift; cueing; masking; identification
• Online Access: https://bop.unibe.ch/JEMR/article/view/2303

The idea of gaze guidance is to lead a viewer’s gaze through a visual display in order to facilitate the viewer’s search for specific information in a least-obtrusive manner. This study investigates saccadic orienting when a viewer is guided in a fast-paced, low-contrast letter identification task. Despite the task’s difficulty and although guiding cues were ad-justed to gaze eccentricity, observers preferred attentional over saccadic shifts to obtain a letter identification judgment; and if a saccade was carried out its saccadic constant error was 50%. From those results we derive a number of design recommendations for the process of gaze guidance.