Ice hockey spectators use contextual cues to guide predictive eye movements

Eye movements are an integral part of human visual perception. They allow us to have a small foveal region with exquisite acuity and at the same time a large visual field. For a long time, eye movements were regarded as machine-like behaviors in response to visual stimulation¹, but over the past few decades it has been convincingly shown that expectations, intended actions, rewards and many other cognitive factors can have profound effects on the way we move our eyes^2-4. In order to be useful, our oculomotor system must minimize delay with respect to the dynamic events in the visual scene. The ability to do so has been demonstrated in situations where we are in control of these events, for example when we are making a sandwich or tea⁵, and when we are active participants, for example when hitting a cricket ball⁶. But what about scenes with complex dynamics that we do not control or directly take part in, like a hockey game we are watching as a spectator? A semantic influence on gaze fixation location during viewing of tennis videos has been suggested before⁷. Here we use carefully annotated hockey videos to show that the brain is indeed able to exploit the semantic context of the game to anticipate the continuous motion of the puck, leading to eye movements that are fundamentally different than when following exactly the same motion without any context.