When we see pictures as adults, our eyes follow mostly typical patterns. For example, we remain on faces or text elements longer. But when do these viewing habits develop? With an eye tracking station in a science museum, researching eye data has collected thousands of people between the ages of five and 72. The evaluation of this data shows that children focus on completely different aspects of the pictures than adults. A fixed viewing pattern is therefore only created at around 20 years.
As we look at a picture, it is not accidental, but follows predictable patterns. For example, faces and texts attract our eyes. In addition, we look at objects in the middle of the picture more than on the edges and mostly explore the motif in a horizontal direction. The design of advertising posters, cinema recordings or professional photographs is often based on these eye patterns. But are these preferences innate to us or are they based on our visual experiences acquired in the course of life?
Blick tracking in the museum
“Earlier studies have shown that the viewing patterns vary more in children than in adults,” explain Marcel Linka from Justus Liebig University Gießen and his colleagues. “This indicates that the way we draw our attention is learned”, however, was unclear at what age we get used to the “typical” focus points. Because most studies only had a limited number of test subjects and only compared individual age groups.
That is why Linka and his team took up this question again. In order to gain as many subjects as possible for their experiment, the research team cooperated with the Mitacht Museum Mathematics in Gießen. For almost two years, large and small museum visitors were able to look at various pictures at an eye tracking station and have their eye movements followed. The data recorded were then provided for research. In this way, Linka and his team collected several million eye movements of more than 6700 people aged five to 72.
Development over two decades
The evaluations of this data showed: Our view patterns are not defined from childhood, but continue to develop over the entire youth. The typical, generalizable habits only form in young adulthood. The attention for text elements increases, for example, significantly from the fifth to the age of 20, as Linka and his colleagues determined. In contrast, there is a mixed trend in faces: the older a child is, the more often it takes a look at a face contained in the picture. Younger children look at faces less often, but they look at them longer. They are also particularly interested in objects that touch people in the picture. This focus loses importance with increasing age.
“We were surprised that adult viewing behavior is slowly developing – over almost two decades,” says Linka. So far, it has been assumed that primary school children already have similar viewing habits as adults. Instead, their visual patterns are still very different – not only compared to those adults, but also with each other. Only in the course of the youth do the eye movements become more similar. “Our perception changes with experience,” explains Linka. “Things that we often see – such as books, screens or street signs – could shape our way of looking.”
The researchers assume that in the course of our lives we learn more and more to quickly grasp the parts of an image that are relevant to us, while we ignore other elements. “We suspect that adults develop ‘mental maps’ for typical scenes, i.e. experience -dependent ideas about which image elements are important for understanding a scene and where they are to be expected,” explains Linka’s colleague Benjamin de Haas. The findings could also help to better respond to the visual experiences and habits of children. “If we know how to look over the years, we can better assess what children need to understand the world,” says de Haas.
Source: Marcel Linka (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) et al., Nature human behavior, DOI: 10.1038/S41562-02191-9
