With this short-term eye-tracking exhibit on the museum Mathematikum, the researchers had been in a position to accumulate 1000’s of information units. Credit: Ben de Haas.
Understanding how individuals visually browse their environment and direct their gaze in particular conditions is a long-standing objective amongst psychology researchers. Previous research counsel that people exhibit oculomotor biases, that are tendencies that information the best way they have a look at the world round them, for example, preferentially directing their gaze across the middle of what they’re visually uncovered to at a given time.
Researchers at Justus Liebig College Giessen in Germany not too long ago carried out a examine geared toward higher understanding how these patterns in gazing habits develop all through the human lifespan. Their findings, revealed in Nature Human Behaviour, counsel that scene viewing tendencies progressively develop over childhood and adolescence, whereas older individuals have a tendency to watch the world following related viewing and gaze fixation methods.
“One of the key questions our lab is interested in is how gaze behavior—that is, where and how we look at natural scenes—develops as we grow up,” Marcel Linka, first writer of the paper, advised Medical Xpress.
“We know that people tend to show certain patterns when looking at scenes. For example, most of us look more at faces and text, focus more on the center of an image, and make more eye movements from side to side (horizontal) rather than up and down (vertical) or diagonal. At the same time, there are large and consistent differences between individuals in how and where they direct their gaze.”
Linka and his colleagues have been finding out human gaze patterns for a number of years. Whereas previous research yielded attention-grabbing outcomes, they realized that the event of gaze habits patterns after childhood remained broadly understudied.
“Earlier studies, including some of our own, showed that children distribute their gaze differently across scenes,” mentioned Linka. “For instance, they look less at text elements. What we didn’t know was how long it takes to develop a typical adult gaze. We only knew that children differ from adults, but not how long this developmental phase lasts.”
As a part of their new examine, the researchers wished to gather and analyze a big dataset containing the gaze patterns of individuals from numerous age teams. As gathering this dataset in a laboratory setting would show difficult, they partnered with the Mathematikum, a hands-on science museum in Giessen, Germany, which is visited by kids and adults of various ages.
“We set up a fully autonomous eye-tracking exhibit at the Mathematikum, where visitors could take part in our experiment on their own, without any assistance,” defined Linka.
“This allowed us to test thousands of people and gather the data we needed to answer our research question.”
Eye-tracking sales space and process. Credit score: Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02191-9
The information analyzed by Linka and his colleagues was collected in an eye-tracking sales space set-up on the museum. When individuals visiting the museum entered this sales space, they had been requested to take a look at 40 on a regular basis scenes displayed on a display for 3 seconds every, with out finishing any explicit job.
“We then explored how different aspects of gaze behavior change with age,” mentioned Linka. “For example, we measured how much time participants spent looking at certain types of objects in the scenes, like text, faces, or objects that were being touched.”
The researchers had been additionally taken with higher understanding how and when spatial biases develop. These are the beforehand reported tendencies to take a look at scenes following particular gaze patterns.
“We know, for instance, that people tend to look more at the center of a scene—this is known as the center bias,” mentioned Linka. “They also tend to move their eyes more horizontally than vertically or diagonally. So, for each participant and age group, we calculated things like how far their gaze was from the center of the image and what proportion of their eye movements were horizontal.”
The ultimate goal of the group’s analyses was to shed new gentle on how totally different viewing tendencies change as individuals develop. Whereas previous research discovered that younger kids have a look at the world following markedly totally different patterns than these noticed in adults, the evolution of gaze-related tendencies all through the human lifespan stays poorly understood.
“In other words, we asked: as we get older, do we start to look at scenes in more similar ways, or do our gaze patterns become more unique?” mentioned Linka. “To investigate this, we measured how similar gaze behavior was within each age group and tracked how this similarity changed across ages, from 5 to 72 years old.”
After they analyzed the info collected on the Mathematikum museum, Linka and his colleagues discovered that it takes a surprisingly very long time for individuals’s gaze habits to turn out to be actually “adult-like.” This contradicts early hypotheses throughout the area of psychology, which steered that almost all gaze-related behaviors are acquired in early childhood.
“For example, when we look at how people tend to focus on text in a scene, we found that this pattern doesn’t fully develop until people are in their early twenties,” mentioned Linka.
“We were also surprised by how the similarity between people’s gaze patterns changes over time. We found that children’s gaze patterns are not only different from adults—they also vary a lot from one child to another. It’s only during adolescence that eye movements gradually become more similar between individuals.”
Protracted improvement of inter-observer similarity. Credit score: Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02191-9
Total, the findings of this latest examine counsel that scene viewing tendencies develop extra progressively than earlier works had predicted. Nonetheless, they don’t but make clear the particular processes that would underpin their improvement.
“These findings, of course, raise many new questions,” mentioned Linka. “For instance, how do gaze patterns develop in the first place? Do we see changes in brain activity in visual areas that match the changes we found in gaze behavior? Could these changes happen because our visual environment changes as we grow—meaning that what we see most often, our ‘visual diet,” shapes what catches our eye?
“For example, as we enter school we will be confronted with more text in our visual diet—might this change our visual preference for text overall? And do we become more similar in how we look at scenes because we gradually develop mental maps that help us know where to look to find the most important information and make sense of what we see?”
Solutions to the questions posed by Linka may assist to grasp how kids see the world, but in addition how their gaze-related habits evolves after they enter adolescence and subsequently maturity. This might in flip assist to plan methods to help kids of their improvement and assist them to make sense of their environment.
“To better understand what drives the development of natural gaze behavior, our next step will be to study what people actually see in their everyday lives—both at home and outside—and how this changes as they grow,” mentioned Linka.
“To do this, we plan to use mobile eye-tracking glasses that record not only what people come across in their daily activities, but also exactly where they look. This will help us explore whether this so-called visual diet—the things we see most often—shapes the way we look at the world.”
The latest work by Linka and his colleagues may quickly encourage different research specializing in the event of viewing tendencies. Of their future research, the researchers additionally hope to carefully look at the event of gaze-related mind processes in the identical individuals, moderately than evaluating the habits of various individuals from distinct age teams.
“We aim to look at changes in the visual areas of the brain that are usually active when we see certain objects, like faces or text,” added Linka. “We are also planning to explore cultural differences in natural gaze behavior to see how this might vary in different parts of the world.”
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Extra info:
Marcel Linka et al, Protracted improvement of gaze behaviour, Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02191-9.
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