Colloquium Cognitive Systems

Approaches to understanding natural gaze behavior

Dr. Alexander Göttker (University Giessen)

Abstract: When trying to understand the fundamentals of gaze control, the common approach across the last decades was to put participants in chin-rest in front of a computer screen. Together with often artificial and well-controlled stimuli, this was the ideal testbed: With high-experimental control, it was possible to gain critical insights into different types of mechanisms. However, I will argue that with this approach, we underestimate the richness of natural gaze behavior. I will present experiments that highlight how gaze behavior is changing across different levels of complexity: From artificial stimuli to natural scenes, from single trials to behavioral sequences, from meaningless dots to intuitive expectations and from the screen into the wild. Together, these results will highlight that to really understand how we move our gaze, we need to study natural gaze behavior in unconstrained conditions. 

About: BSc and MSc in Psychology in Gießen, PhD in Gießen with Karl Gegenfurtner. Postdoc in Gießen working in the SFB ‘Cardinal Mechanisms of Perception’ and now the Excellence Cluster ‘The Adaptive Mind’. In between: Lab Visits at Queens University Kingston, Canada, VU Amsterdam, Meta Reality Labs

Interests: Eye Movements in all shapes or forms, Natural Behavior, Psychophysics, Serial Dependence Effects, Intuitive Physics