Enumeration strategy differences revealed by saccade-terminated eye tracking

Abstract Brain regions involved in saccadic eye movements partially overlap with a frontoparietal network implicated in encoding numerosities. Eye movement patterns may plausibly reflect strategic scanning behaviours to resolve the open-ended task of efficiently enumerating visual arrays. If so, these patterns may help explain individual differences in enumeration acuity in terms of well-understood visual attention mechanisms. Most enumeration eye-tracking paradigms, however, do not allow for direct manipulation of eye movement behaviours to test these claims. In the current study we terminated trials after a specified number of saccades to systematically probe the time course of enumeration strategies. Fifteen adults (11 naive, 4 informed) enumerated random dot arrays under three conditions: (1) a novel saccade-terminated design where arrays were visible until one, two or four saccades had occurred; (2) a duration-terminated design where arrays were shown for 250, 500 or 1000 ms; and (3) a response-terminated design where arrays were visible until a response. Participants gave more accurate responses when enumerating saccade-terminated trials despite taking a similar time as in the duration-terminated trials. When participants were informed how trials would terminate, their saccade onset latencies shifted to match task demands. Rotating saccade vectors to align with salient image locations accounted for variability in the orientation of saccade trajectories. These findings (1) show a combination of stimulus-derived visual processing and task-based strategic demands account for enumeration eye movements patterns, (2) validate a novel saccade-contingent trial termination procedure for studying sequences of enumeration eye movements, and (3) highlight the need to include analyses of spatial and temporal eye movement patterns into models of visual enumeration strategies.