Fast and frequent corrections of saccadic decisions underlie a satisficing strategy when searching everyday scenes
Katarzyna Jurewicz, Buxin Liao, B. Suresh Krishna · 2023
It remains unclear how and how much visual mechanisms integrate visual information across fixations. We analyze three large eye-movement datasets from human observers free-viewing or searching for category-defined targets in photographs of everyday scenes (COCO-Search18, COCO-FreeView and 900 Scenes). During goal-directed search, fixation periods with strikingly short duration (< 125 ms) form over a third of all fixations after the first saccade. Visual information obtained during these short-duration fixations cannot influence the following short?latency saccade, which therefore has to be executed based on target identity and location information carried over from previous fixations. Short-latency saccades are goal-directed: they foveate the search-target more often than other (regular-latency) saccades. Active searching and search-target salience increase the frequency of short-duration fixations. Human searchers use a satisficing strategy based on information transfer across saccades that aids minimizing the cost of making additional saccades to non-target stimuli.