Linear Embodied Saliency: a Model of Full-Body Kinematics-based Visual Attention

Gaze behaviour and motor actions are fundamentally interlinked in both a spatial and temporal manner. However, the vast majority of gaze behaviour research has focused to date on reductionist head-fixed screen viewing experiments and ignored the motor aspect of visuomotor behaviour, thereby neglecting a critical component of the perception-action loop. We address this with an experimental design to capture, rather than constrain, the full range of simultaneous gaze and motor behaviour in a range of natural daily life tasks. Through building autoregressive models and applying these to our novel datasets we find that beyond simple static regions of interest, we can predict visual attention shifts from freely-moving first person body kinematics, through explaining gaze dynamics in the context of body dynamics, on the timescale of freely moving interactive behaviour in individuals, expanding our understanding of natural visuomotor behaviour.