2D) differ only little (mean saccade durations: 32.1 ms, 31.0 ms, and, 33.8 ms for monkeys D, M, and S, respectively). In a next step we investigated how the eye movements of the three monkeys were spatially distributed on the viewed images, and if these also show differences between monkeys D and M, and S. The spatial distribution on one specific image was derived from eye movements across

all presentations of the image. We observed that the spatial distributions of fixations of monkeys D and M exhibit dense spatial clusters that are related to conspicuous objects in the underlying CH5424802 molecular weight images (see examples for four different images in Fig. 3). The positions of the clusters are qualitatively similar for both monkeys for the same image, but are qualitatively different for each individual image (Fig. 3, columns 1, 2). However, the spatial fixation distributions of monkey S are unique: more than 90% of his fixations are evenly distributed inside a large cluster in the lower left quadrant of the images. This pattern selleck inhibitor is conserved across different images, and seems independent of the content of the images (Fig. 3, column 3), indicating that the eye movements of this monkey were not related to the images. It is unlikely that the differences in fixation duration

and of the exploration patterns of monkey S were due to a physiological dysfunction of his oculomotor system, since his saccade durations were very much in agreement with the other monkeys (Fig. 2D), indicating an intact saccade generation mechanism. Inspection of the fixations on images containing only a fixation spot, routinely presented just before each natural image to detect potential artifacts and eye calibration issues, shows that monkey S did fixate on the fixation spot within the required limits. Therefore we concluded that the monkey adopted an unusual strategy to get rewarded, deliberately gazing over the images without paying attention to the images contents. We include data from this animal

both as a comparison to the other monkeys, and as a potential methodological issue for further studies. For monkeys D and M, we assume that each of the spatial fixation clusters represents a subjective ROI. The position of subjective ROIs on an individual image is ADP ribosylation factor likely to depend on at least two factors: a bottom–up image feature driven component and a top–down attentional factor. To explore the contribution of the bottom–up component on the spatial positions of the subjective ROIs, we compare in a next step the similarity of the map of the fixations with the saliency map of the respective image. We computed the saliency maps of the images based on the model described by Walther and Koch (2006) (see examples in Fig. 4A). Simultaneously we computed the fixation maps for each image and monkey by down-sampling the original 800 × 600 pixels-images to 30 × 40 pixels-images and normalized correspondingly the original fixation distribution (details in Section 4.4).