What is it about?
We find that how people look around the world is stable and idiosyncratic: each person leaves a kind of attentional signature in the scenes they explore. To show this, we tracked where people looked as they moved through immersive 360° environments in VR, then used AI models to ask what kinds of information best predicted each person’s gaze. The answer was not just visual salience, or where objects happened to be in space. People’s gaze patterns were also shaped by conceptual priorities — the abstract meanings, relationships, and possibilities that each person brings to bear while exploring their world.
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Why is it important?
Where do individual differences in cognition begin? They may begin with attention: with the small, repeated choices our minds make about what to notice, what to ignore, and what kinds of meaning to seek in the world.
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This page is a summary of: Conceptual priorities shape individual gaze patterns during naturalistic visual attention, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2604369123.
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