Active vision is tuned to representational distinctiveness in the individual brain

Individuals reliably differ in how they look at complex visual scenes, with the most prominent variation in their propensity to fixate faces and text. In 60 adults, we tested the hypothesis that these differences in gaze are tuned to representational properties of the individual visual system. Eye-tracking captured each observer’s characteristic gaze tendencies during naturalistic scene viewing, and functional magnetic resonance imaging recorded category-selective responses to faces, words, and other stimuli when participants were instructed to fixate centrally. We find that the propensity to fixate faces or text goes along with enhanced distinctiveness of corresponding categorical representations in the ventral stream, which in turn predicts performance on reading and face recognition tasks. Thus, active vision appears tuned to the precision of category-selective encoding in the individual brain.