Gaze and informativeness during category learning: Evidence for an inverse relation

Abstract

In what follows, we explore the general relationship between eye gaze during a category learning task and the information conveyed by each member of the learned category. To understand the nature of this relationship empirically, we used eye tracking during a novel object classification paradigm. Results suggest that the average fixation time per object during learning is inversely proportional to the amount of information that object conveys about its category. This inverse relationship may seem counterintuitive; however, objects that have a high-information value are inherently more representative of their category. Therefore, their generality captures the essence of the category structure relative to less representative objects. As such, it takes relatively less time to process these objects than their less informative companions. We use a general information measure referred to as representational information theory (Vigo, 2011a, 2013a) to articulate and interpret the results from our experiment and compare its predictions to those of three models of prototypicality.

Keywords:

• Category learning
• Eye movements
• Math modelling
• Object-based attention
• Representational information

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Mark Gould for his invaluable help with data management as well as Mikayla Barcus, Charles Doan, Basawaraj, Yu Zhang, and Jinling Zhao for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

¹By including a scaling parameter b (where b is a positive real number) for scaling information units to units of time, the IMF is defined as shown below where T _F (x∣C) may then be regarded as the fixation time devoted to object x. Please note that in this paper, we only discuss and fit the data with the parameter-free version of the IMF introduced earlier and not with this version.