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The relationship between fixations and saccades that characterize eye movements have suggested the existence of two scene processing strategies- ambient and focal - the former is believed to capture the context of the scene whereas the latter helps in the detailed examination of the scene. Until recently, detailed analysis of these processing strategies have been performed only in young adults. Recently, however, these modes were found to exist in the viewing behavior of children as well. In the current study, we investigated two undiscovered aspects related to these processing modes- first, we studied the combined impact of visual processing modes and observer's age on the distribution of gaze locations, and second, we investigated how bottom up features of a scene influence the gaze behavior during ambient and focal modes across age groups. These analysis were performed over the eye tracking data collected over 50 observers of different age groups while viewing naturalistic scenes. Explorativeness and bit rate measures were developed to investigate the changes in gaze distribution. The result showed that an observer is more explorative during the focal mode than during the ambient processing mode, while the information processing rate follows a reverse trend. The influence of bottom up features was investigated using the area under the curve (AUC) metric and it was found that the bottom-up influence was more dominant during focal than the ambient mode for all age groups. We also investigated whether human face attracted attention and gaze differently during ambient and focal mode. The result showed that face were equally gazed during both processing modes.
Krishna et al. (2017) studied this question.