Vanishing point attracts gaze in free-viewing and visual search tasks

Understand

To investigate whether the vanishing point (VP) plays a significant role in gaze guidance, we ran two experiments.

• In the first one, we recorded fixations of 10 observers (4 female; mean age 22; SD=0.84) freely viewing 532 images, out of which 319 had VP (shuffled presentation; each image for 4 secs).
• We found that the average number of fixations at a local region (80x80 pixels) centered at the VP is significantly higher than the average fixations at random locations (t-test; n=319; p=1.8e-35).
• To address the confounding factor of saliency, we learned a combined model of bottom-up saliency and VP.