Analysis of Temporal Changes of Gaze Locations Measured When Observers Determine Impressions for Subjects in Images

Abstract

We investigated how the observer's gaze locations temporally move over the subject's body parts in images while tack- ling the tasks of determining the subject's impression. We also investigated how the temporal changes of the gaze locations vary when different impression words are contained in the tasks. Existing analytical studies have not considered the tem- poral changes of the gaze locations, though they have revealed the spatial alignment of the subject's body parts that gather gaze locations. In our experiments, we gave observers several tasks to determine the subject's impressions in images and measured their gaze locations in a time series while viewing the images. We computed the distance from the observer's gaze location to the subject's body part location at each time and evaluated the difference of the distances between the tasks. We found that the observer's gaze locations move away from the face and move to the upper and lower body parts variously as time passes, though the gaze location is gathered on the face at the initial time. We also found the impression words with similar and dissimilar temporal changes of the gaze locations among the words contained in the tasks.