Your gaze betrays your age
Résumé
Visual attention networks are so pervasive in the
human brain that eye movements carry a wealth of information
that can be exploited for many purposes. In this paper, we present
evidence that information derived from observers’ gaze can be
used to infer their age. This is the first study showing that
simple features extracted from the ordered sequence of fixations
and saccades allow us to predict the age of an observer. Eye
movements of 101 participants split into 4 age groups (adults,
6-10 year-old, 4-6 year-old and 2 year-old) were recorded while
exploring static images. The analysis of observers’ gaze provides
evidence of age-related differences in viewing patterns. Therefore,
we extract from the scanpaths several features, including fixation
durations and saccade amplitudes, and learn a direct mapping
from those features to age using Gentle AdaBoost classifiers.
Experimental results show that the proposed image-blind method
succeeds in predicting the age of the observer up to 92% of the
time. The use of predicted salience does not further improve the
classification’s accuracy.