Date: Friday, October 17,  2025
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Simons Center Conference room 46-6011 + Zoom [https://mit.zoom.us/j/93701332166]

Speaker: Caroline Robertson,  Ph.D.
Affiliation: Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College

Talk title: Seeing What Matters: Semantic Drivers of Gaze in Natural Environments

Abstract: Visual attention in everyday life is driven by both image-computable factors in the visual environment, and also the latent cognitive priorities of the viewer. In this talk, I will present two naturalistic eye-tracking studies that leverage computational language models to uncover the cognitive priorities guiding the gaze behavior of individuals with and without autism. First, using eye-tracking in immersive VR, we find that individuals with and without autism exhibit stable “semantic fingerprints” in their gaze, when the targets of their visual attention are modeled in the representational space of a large language model. Second, in dyadic conversations, mobile eye-tracking shows that gaze to the conversation partner’s face is modulated by the ongoing semantic context in conversation, including linguistic surprisal. Together, these findings position gaze as a window into the semantic and predictive processes that guide attention, offering new leverage for modeling individual differences in natural contexts.