Depth Affects Where We Look.

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Depth Affects Where We Look. Curr Biol. 2008 Dec 3; Authors: Wexler M, Ouarti N Understanding how we spontaneously scan the visual world through eye movements is crucial for characterizing both the strategies and inputs of vision [1-27]. Despite the importance of the third or depth dimension for perception and action, little is known about how the specifically three-dimensional aspects of scenes affect looking behavior. Here we show that three-dimensional surface orientation has a surprisingly large effect on spontaneous exploration, and we demonstrate that a simple rule predicts eye movements given surface orientation in three dimensions: saccades tend to follow surface depth gradients. The rule proves to be quite robust: it generalizes across depth cues, holds in the presence or absence of a task, and applies to more complex three-dimensional objects. These results not only lead to a more accurate understanding of visuo-motor strategies, but also suggest a possible new oculomotor technique for studying three-dimensional vision from a variety of depth cues in subjects-such as animals or human infants-that cannot explicitly report their perceptions. PMID: 19062283 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

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