Protracted development of gaze behaviour

How does natural gaze behaviour develop? Here, we present data from > 6,500 subjects from 5-72 years of age, freely viewing 40 natural scenes. We find that the development of scene viewing is surprisingly protracted. Semantic salience for social features continuously changes until late adolescence and text salience increases until the third decade of life. Basic oculomotor biases towards the image centre and along the horizontal meridian develop until early adulthood, matching developmental changes in visual sensitivity and cortex. Finally, while the tendency for visual exploration continuously increases, fixation patterns become less idiosyncratic and more canonical throughout adolescence. These findings show that fundamental aspects of adult gaze take decades of continuous development and push individuals towards more canonical viewing patterns. We suggest that development is key to understanding the general mechanisms of active vision.