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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15227v1
• Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2026 17:29:18 GMT
• Title: Divergent Gaze Patterns in Artistic Viewing: Spatial and Temporal Signatures of Attention Across Autistic Individuals, Artists, and Neurotypical Observers
• Abstract summary: We present a comparative free-viewing study across three groups, autistic adults (ASD), trained artists, and neurotypical observers.<n>We introduce a directed, metric-grounded framework that compares groups along two complementary axes.
• Score: 5.604938267658841
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• 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.

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