Eye-tracking exhibit helps map gaze behavior development across different life stages

Understanding how people visually browse their surroundings and direct their gaze in specific situations is a long-standing goal among psychology researchers. Past studies suggest that humans exhibit oculomotor biases, which are tendencies that guide the way they look at the world around them, for instance, preferentially directing their gaze around the center of what they are visually exposed to at a given time.

Researchers at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding how these patterns in gazing behavior develop throughout the human lifespan. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that scene viewing tendencies gradually develop over childhood and adolescence, while older people tend to observe the world following similar viewing and gaze fixation strategies.

“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 author of the paper, told 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 studying human gaze patterns for several years. While past studies yielded interesting results, they realized that the development of gaze behavior patterns after childhood remained widely understudied.

“Earlier studies, including some of our own, showed that children distribute their gaze differently across scenes,” said 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 part of their new study, the researchers wished to collect and analyze a large dataset containing the gaze patterns of people from various age groups. As collecting this dataset in a laboratory setting would prove challenging, they partnered with the Mathematikum, a hands-on science museum in Giessen, Germany, which is visited by children and adults of different 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,” explained Linka.

“This allowed us to test thousands of people and gather the data we needed to answer our research question.”

The data analyzed by Linka and his colleagues was collected in an eye-tracking booth set-up at the museum. When people visiting the museum entered this booth, they were asked to look at 40 everyday scenes displayed on a screen for 3 seconds each, without completing any particular task.

“We then explored how different aspects of gaze behavior change with age,” said 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 were also interested in better understanding how and when spatial biases develop. These are the previously reported tendencies to look at scenes following specific 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,” said 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 final objective of the team’s analyses was to shed new light on how different viewing tendencies change as people grow. While past studies found that young children look at the world following markedly different patterns than those observed in adults, the evolution of gaze-related tendencies throughout the human lifespan remains 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?” said 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.”

When they analyzed the data collected at the Mathematikum museum, Linka and his colleagues found that it takes a surprisingly long time for people’s gaze behavior to become truly “adult-like.” This contradicts early hypotheses within the field of psychology, which suggested that most 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,” said 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.”

Overall, the findings of this recent study suggest that scene viewing tendencies develop more gradually than earlier works had predicted. Nonetheless, they do not yet clarify the specific processes that could underpin their development.

“These findings, of course, raise many new questions,” said 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?”

Answers to the questions posed by Linka could help to understand how children see the world, but also how their gaze-related behavior evolves when they enter adolescence and subsequently adulthood. This could in turn help to devise strategies to support children in their development and help them to make sense of their surroundings.

“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,” said 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 recent work by Linka and his colleagues could soon inspire other studies focusing on the development of viewing tendencies. In their future studies, the researchers also hope to closely examine the development of gaze-related brain processes in the same people, rather than comparing the behavior of different people from distinct age groups.

“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.”

© 2025 Science X Network

Understanding how people visually browse their surroundings and direct their gaze in specific situations is a long-standing goal among psychology researchers. Past studies suggest that humans exhibit oculomotor biases, which are tendencies that guide the way they look at the world around them, for instance, preferentially directing their gaze around the center of what they are visually exposed to at a given time.

Researchers at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding how these patterns in gazing behavior develop throughout the human lifespan. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that scene viewing tendencies gradually develop over childhood and adolescence, while older people tend to observe the world following similar viewing and gaze fixation strategies.

“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 author of the paper, told 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 studying human gaze patterns for several years. While past studies yielded interesting results, they realized that the development of gaze behavior patterns after childhood remained widely understudied.

“Earlier studies, including some of our own, showed that children distribute their gaze differently across scenes,” said 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 part of their new study, the researchers wished to collect and analyze a large dataset containing the gaze patterns of people from various age groups. As collecting this dataset in a laboratory setting would prove challenging, they partnered with the Mathematikum, a hands-on science museum in Giessen, Germany, which is visited by children and adults of different 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,” explained Linka.

“This allowed us to test thousands of people and gather the data we needed to answer our research question.”

The data analyzed by Linka and his colleagues was collected in an eye-tracking booth set-up at the museum. When people visiting the museum entered this booth, they were asked to look at 40 everyday scenes displayed on a screen for 3 seconds each, without completing any particular task.

“We then explored how different aspects of gaze behavior change with age,” said 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 were also interested in better understanding how and when spatial biases develop. These are the previously reported tendencies to look at scenes following specific 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,” said 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 final objective of the team’s analyses was to shed new light on how different viewing tendencies change as people grow. While past studies found that young children look at the world following markedly different patterns than those observed in adults, the evolution of gaze-related tendencies throughout the human lifespan remains 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?” said 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.”

When they analyzed the data collected at the Mathematikum museum, Linka and his colleagues found that it takes a surprisingly long time for people’s gaze behavior to become truly “adult-like.” This contradicts early hypotheses within the field of psychology, which suggested that most 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,” said 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.”

Overall, the findings of this recent study suggest that scene viewing tendencies develop more gradually than earlier works had predicted. Nonetheless, they do not yet clarify the specific processes that could underpin their development.

“These findings, of course, raise many new questions,” said 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?”

Answers to the questions posed by Linka could help to understand how children see the world, but also how their gaze-related behavior evolves when they enter adolescence and subsequently adulthood. This could in turn help to devise strategies to support children in their development and help them to make sense of their surroundings.

“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,” said 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 recent work by Linka and his colleagues could soon inspire other studies focusing on the development of viewing tendencies. In their future studies, the researchers also hope to closely examine the development of gaze-related brain processes in the same people, rather than comparing the behavior of different people from distinct age groups.

“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.”

© 2025 Science X Network