What am I Looking at? Interpreting Dynamic and Static Gaze Displays

Displays of eye movements may convey information about cognitive processes but require interpretation. We investigated whether participants were able to interpret displays of their own or other’s eye movements. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants observed an image under three different viewing instructions. Then they were shown static or dynamic gaze displays and had to judge whether it was their own or someone else’s eye movements and what instruction was reflected. Participants were capable of recognizing the instruction reflected in their own and someone else’s gaze display. Instruction recognition was better for dynamic displays, and only this condition yielded above chance performance in recognizing the display as one’s own or another person’s (Experiment 1 & 2). Experiment 3 revealed that order information in the gaze displays only facilitated instruction recognition from scanpaths where the same regions were fixated, but fixation order distinguished the task. Implications of these findings are discussed.