Knowledge differences affect gaze behavior during naturalistic object exploration

How does knowledge affect visual exploration? Here, we investigated whether learning about an object would change participants’ gaze behavior. Adults (N = 22) wore a head-mounted eye tracker while exploring real-world objects that were relatively unfamiliar (e.g., a rolodex). We assessed learning-related differences in both (1) oculomotor behavior (e.g., fixation durations) and (2) participants' fixated visual content by leveraging embeddings from a large vision-language model. We find evidence that before learning, gaze is more exploratory (i.e., shorter, more frequent fixations). Moreover, we find that differences in fixated content across participants are increased after learning about an object, suggesting that knowledge states may contribute to differences in gaze behavior. These results underscore the importance for future work of quantifying individual knowledge states to further leverage naturalistic eye tracking as a window into learning and cognitive development.