Your gaze betrays your age

Abstract

Visual attention networks are so pervasive in the human brain that eye movements carry a wealth of information that can be exploited for many purposes. In this paper, we present evidence that information derived from observers' gaze can be used to infer their age. This is the first study showing that simple features extracted from the ordered sequence of fixations and saccades allow us to predict the age of an observer. Eye movements of 101 participants split into 4 age groups (adults, 6–10 year-old, 4–6 year-old and 2 year-old) were recorded while exploring static images. The analysis of observers' gaze provides evidence of age-related differences in viewing patterns. Therefore, we extract from the scanpaths several features, including fixation durations and saccade amplitudes, and learn a direct mapping from those features to age using Gentle AdaBoost classifiers. Experimental results show that the proposed image-blind method succeeds in predicting the age of the observer up to 92% of the time. The use of predicted salience does not further improve the classification's accuracy.