Successfully completing many forms of behaviour requires that humans look in the right place at the right time. Ballard and colleagues described this as a “do-it-where-I’m-looking” visual strategy for completing complex tasks; a finding that has been replicated across a range of studies of natural behaviour.

One reason why we look at the location we are interested in gathering information from is that the human retina evolved such that high quality vision is restricted to the small (~2º) fovea at the centre of vision. For many visually-guided behaviours the coarse information from peripheral vision is insufficient, thus requiring mechanisms to direct the foveae to appropriate locations. This has generated a large volume of research aimed at understanding how the eyes are guided.

The most influential models for this task are based on visual salience (i.e., low-level conspicuity). Saliency models have been applied to military, medical and safety problems and to understand where consumers fixate when viewing advertisements or websites. Despite their prominence no reliable evidence supports the claim that salience is causal in gaze selection. On the contrary, the published evidence argues that at best there are weak correlations between salience and where we look, and then only under certain unrealistic conditions.

This ongoing project in the lab aims to dispel the salience ‘myth’ and understand what factors really do matter in selecting where we fixate.