Eye-Tracking Data in Visual Search Tasks: A Hallmark of Cognitive Function

Abstract

Vision is an active process in that detailed representations of our visual world are only built from actively scanning our eyes with a series of saccades and fixations. The process of actively scanning a visual scene while looking for something in a cluttered environment is known as visual search. The study of visual search processes not only offers a unique opportunity to gain fundamental insights into visual information processing in the human brain, but also opens new avenues to assess cognitive function. In this work, we show that it is possible to unveil the strategies pursued by subjects to solve visual tasks by investigating dynamical aspects inherent to eye-tracking data in a generalized N-dimensional feature domain.