Divergent Gaze Patterns in Artistic Viewing: Spatial and Temporal Signatures of Attention Across Autistic Individuals, Artists, and Neurotypical Observers
2026-07-16 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionHuman-Computer Interaction
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how autistic adults, trained artists, and typical adults look at paintings differently. They tracked where and when people looked and found that artists and typical adults look very similarly, both in terms of where their eyes focus and the timing of their gaze. Autistic adults explore a similar wide area as artists but look in a different and less consistent way over time, with shorter and more varied eye movements. This shows autistic viewing behavior is unique and suggests models of how people appreciate art should consider these group differences. The authors also shared their analysis tools and detailed results.
eye-trackingautism spectrum disorder (ASD)fixation-density mapscanpath analysissaliency metricsfree-viewingdispersion-threshold algorithmtemporal gaze patternsmultiMatchdynamic time warping
Authors
Mohammed Amine Kerkouri, Daphné Senggaran, Renaud Jusiak, Océane Lehmann, Marouane Tliba, Claire Wardak, Emmanuelle Houy-Durand, Shasha Morel-Kohlmeyer, Aladine Chetouani, Nadia Aguillon-Hernandez
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.