Fixation termination during visual search with simulated visual impairments

Abstract

Everyday tasks such as finding a friend in a crowd rely on efficient visual search, a process that heavily relies on efficiently executing eye movements. But how does our visual system adapt eye movement behavior when visual input is degraded? Here, we investigated whether eye movement behaviour during visual search adjusts to simulated visual impairments through low-level mechanisms—such as increasing fixation durations—or through higher-level strategies like increasing lag-2 revisits (when the eyes quickly return to an object after briefly fixating elsewhere). Participants performed a visual search task whilst their eye movement behaviour was recorded under three conditions: normal vision (control), monocular vision (with an eye patch over the dominant eye), and low-contrast vision (with reduced stimulus contrast). Overall, we found that search was slowed under conditions of simulated visual impairments, with increases in RTs, fixation durations, and time to fixate the target compared with a control condition. We found no evidence that lag-2 revisit rates increased. Our results provide further support for mixed-control models of fixation termination and have implications for understanding eye movement control under visual impairments. Our results may also inform rehabilitation strategies for individuals with visual loss.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Guido Maiello: orcid.org/0000-0001-6625-2583

ORCID for Arezoo Pooresmaeili: orcid.org/0000-0002-4369-8838

ORCID for Jayne Morriss: orcid.org/0000-0002-7928-9673

ORCID for Hayward Godwin: orcid.org/0009-0005-1232-500X

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