Divergent Gaze Patterns in Artistic Viewing: Spatial and Temporal Signatures of Attention Across Autistic Individuals, Artists, and Neurotypical Observers

2026-07-16

AI Summary

This study addresses a gap in eye-tracking research by examining visual attention during art viewing, an area largely overlooked in favor of social scenes. It proposes a novel analytical framework integrating spatial (fixation density maps) and temporal (scanpaths) dimensions to systematically compare visual exploration patterns among autistic individuals, artists, and neurotypical controls during free viewing of 30 paintings. Using dispersion-threshold identification to extract fixations and evaluating performance with six saliency metrics—including AUC-Judd and NSS—alongside temporal alignment methods such as MultiMatch and Dynamic Time Warping, the study reveals high consistency between artists and neurotypicals, whereas autistic participants exhibit broader spatial exploration, shorter fixation durations, and highly idiosyncratic scanpaths. These findings underscore a distinct aesthetic attention mechanism in autism and advocate for population-specific modeling of visual aesthetic attention.

Abstract

How different populations visually explore artworks bears on cognitive science and on accessibility design, yet most eye-tracking work in autism has used social scenes rather than art, and has analysed where the eyes land while ignoring when and in what order. We present a comparative free-viewing study across three groups, autistic adults (ASD), trained artists, and neurotypical observers, who each viewed 30 paintings for 15s. We introduce a directed, metric-grounded framework that compares groups along two complementary axes: a spatial axis, in which one group's fixation-density map predicts another's fixations under six saliency metrics (AUC-Judd, NSS, CC, SIM, KL, Information Gain); and a temporal axis, in which individual scanpaths are compared with MultiMatch, ScanMatch, a foveal-disc IoU score (FDISS), and dynamic time warping (DTW). Fixations are extracted uniformly for all groups with a dispersion-threshold algorithm. Three results converge. (i)Artists and neurotypicals are almost indistinguishable in both space (density-map correlation CC=0.96) and time (they form the most alignable scanpath pair), whereas ASD gaze diverges from both. (ii)ASD attention is dissociated: it matches artists' wide spatial exploration (dispersion, explored area) but carries a distinct temporal signature, shorter fixations, less dwell, and the most idiosyncratic (least self-consistent) scanpaths of any group. (iii)ASD gaze is not selectively artist-like on any metric; if anything it is marginally closer to neurotypical. Together these findings indicate that autistic viewing of art is a distinct, group-specific attentional profile in both space and time, and they motivate population-conditioned models of aesthetic attention. We release all analysis code and per-stimulus results.

Problem

• autism
• eye-tracking
• art viewing
• visual attention
• scanpath

Innovation

• eye-tracking
• scanpath analysis
• attentional profile
• autism spectrum disorder
• aesthetic perception