Background of Example 1

The following example is based on a subset of participants from
Bovet, J., Lao, J., & Caldara, R., & Raymond, M. (2016). Mapping females' bodily features of attractiveness. Scientific Reports, 6, 18551; doi: 10.1038/srep18551

In short, the example dataset consists of eye movement data from twenty male observers during a gaze-contingent study. Observers viewed computer rendered female bodies in different conditions and performed a behavioral task (i.e., subjective rating of bodily attractiveness). This is a within-subject design with two experimental manipulations: the viewing condition (three level: 2° spotlight, 4° spotlight, or natural viewing) and body orientation (two level: front view or back view). The aim of the study is to evaluate the visual information use for bodily attractiveness evaluation in the male observers. Other details of the experiment can be found in the paper.

Fixation durations were projected into the two-dimensional space according to their coordinates at the single-trial level. Fixation duration maps were first smoothed at 1° of visual angle. We used the “estimated” option by taking the expected values across trial within the same condition independently for each observer. To reduce the computational time, we down-sampled the fixation map to 256*205 pixels, and applied a mask to only model the pixels with average duration larger than half of the minimum fixation duration input.