Exploration and Exploitation in Natural Viewing Behavior

Many eye-tracking studies investigate visual behavior with a focus on image
features and the semantic content of a scene. Our understanding of the
decision process where to look has reached a mature stage. However, the
temporal aspect, whether to stay and further scrutinize a region
(exploitation) or to move on and explore image regions that were yet not in
the focus of attention (exploration) is less well understood. Here, we
investigate the trade-off between these two processes across stimuli with
varying properties and sizes.