# Divergent Gaze Patterns in Artistic Viewing: Spatial and Temporal Signatures of Attention Across Autistic Individuals, Artists, and Neurotypical Observers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15227/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [What do different evaluation metrics tell us about saliency models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03605/) (2016)
- [A domain adaptive deep learning solution for scanpath prediction of paintings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11338/) (2022)
- [What They Saw, Not Just Where They Looked: Semantic Scanpath Similarity via VLMs and NLP metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08494/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

How different populations visually explore artworks bears on cognitive science and on accessibility design, yet most eye-tracking work in autism has used social scenes rather than art, and has analysed where the eyes land while ignoring when and in what order. We present a comparative free-viewing study across three groups, autistic adults (ASD), trained artists, and neurotypical observers, who each viewed 30 paintings for 15s. We introduce a directed, metric-grounded framework that compares groups along two complementary axes: a spatial axis, in which one group's fixation-density map predicts another's fixations under six saliency metrics (AUC-Judd, NSS, CC, SIM, KL, Information Gain); and a temporal axis, in which individual scanpaths are compared with MultiMatch, ScanMatch, a foveal-disc IoU score (FDISS), and dynamic time warping (DTW). Fixations are extracted uniformly for all groups with a dispersion-threshold algorithm. Three results converge. (i)Artists and neurotypicals are almost indistinguishable in both space (density-map correlation CC=0.96) and time (they form the most alignable scanpath pair), whereas ASD gaze diverges from both. (ii)ASD attention is dissociated: it matches artists' wide spatial exploration (dispersion, explored area) but carries a distinct temporal signature, shorter fixations, less dwell, and the most idiosyncratic (least self-consistent) scanpaths of any group. (iii)ASD gaze is not selectively artist-like on any metric; if anything it is marginally closer to neurotypical. Together these findings indicate that autistic viewing of art is a distinct, group-specific attentional profile in both space and time, and they motivate population-conditioned models of aesthetic attention. We release all analysis code and per-stimulus results.