freeviewing

Free viewing is a research paradigm used in cognitive psychology and neuroscience in which participants view visual stimuli without explicit tasks or instructions beyond looking at the scene. The approach aims to capture natural gaze behavior and the alignment of attention with the content of the stimuli, rather than task-driven processing.

In free-viewing experiments, researchers commonly use static images or dynamic video clips. Eye-tracking devices record where and how long a person looks at different parts of the stimulus, producing measures such as fixation duration, fixation count, saccade amplitude, scanpaths, and sometimes pupil dilation. Stimuli are typically presented with minimal guidance, allowing observers to explore the scene freely.

Data from free viewing are often analyzed to infer mechanisms of attention and perception. Researchers generate fixation heatmaps and scanpath visualizations, and quantify agreement between human gaze patterns and computational saliency models. Applications include studying scene recognition, object detection, memory encoding, social perception, and the influence of low-level versus high-level features on gaze.

Considerations for interpretation include the effect of instructions, which can shift viewing strategies, as well as individual differences in viewing styles. Experimental design issues such as stimulus selection, sequence effects, and calibration quality affect data quality and comparability. While highly informative for understanding spontaneous attention, free-viewing data are exploratory and often complemented by task-based paradigms to clarify causal relationships between gaze and cognitive processes.