Optimal control of eye-movements during visual search

Abstract: We study the problem of optimal oculomotor control during the execution of visual search tasks. We introduce a computational model of human eye movements, which takes into account various constraints of the human visual and oculomotor systems. In the model, the choice of the subsequent fixation location is posed as a problem of stochastic optimal control, which relies on reinforcement learning methods. We show that if biological constraints are taken into account, the trajectories simulated under learned policy share both basic statistical properties and scaling behaviour with human eye movements. We validated our model simulations with human psychophysical eye-tracking experiments