Protracted development of gaze behaviour

• DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/x7rkw_v2
• Publication Date: 2025-04-04T09:26:59Z
• Authors: Marcel Linka; Harun Karimpur; Benjamin de Haas

How does natural gaze behaviour develop? Here, we present data from > 6,500 subjects 5-72 years of age, freely viewing 40 scenes. We find that the development scene is surprisingly protracted. Semantic salience for social features continuously changes until late adolescence and text increases third decade life. Basic oculomotor biases towards image centre along horizontal meridian develop early adulthood, matching developmental in visual sensitivity cortex. Finally, while tendency exploration increases, fixation patterns become less idiosyncratic more canonical throughout adolescence. These findings show fundamental aspects adult take decades continuous push individuals patterns. suggest key to understanding general mechanisms active vision.