Top-down control of eye movements: Yarbus revisited

Abstract

Alfred Yarbus (1967) reported that an observer's eye movement record varied based on high-level task. He found that an observer's eye movement patterns during freeview were dramatically different than when given tasks such as “Remember the clothes worn by the people.” Although Yarbus’ work is often cited to demonstrate the task-dependence of eye movements, it is often misrepresented; Yarbus reported results for only one observer, but authors commonly refer to Yarbus’ “observers”. Additionally, his observer viewed the painting for 21 minutes with optical stalks attached to the sclera and with his head severely restricted. Although eye movements are undoubtedly influenced by high-level tasks, it is not clear how Yarbus’ results reflect his unique experimental conditions. Because of Yarbus’ role in the literature, it is important to determine the extent to which his results represent a sample of naïve observers under more natural conditions. We replicated Yarbus’ experiment using a head-free eyetracker with 17 naïve observers. The presentations were self-paced; viewing times were typically an order of magnitude shorter than the times Yarbus imposed. Eye movement patterns were clearly task dependent, but some of the differences were much less dramatic than those shown in Yarbus’ now-classic observations.

Keywords:

• Attention
• Eye movements
• Visual cognition

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge Jason Babcock and Constantin Rothkopf for their valuable contributions.