Fig. 1.

Experimental design. The top panel shows the three different types of blocks: typical, atypical and fixation. In each run, subjects alternated between making large typical and atypical saccadic eye movements in order to track a yellow fixation cross over a static face image. A typical scanpath was operationally defined as a scanpath where the fixation landed upon the eyes or mouth approximately 90% of the time. An atypical scanpath was operationally defined as a scanpath where the fixation landed upon the eyes or mouth approximately 12% of the time. Typical and atypical blocks were always separated by a fixation block where the subject had to make small saccades to track the fixation cross while it made small movements in the center of the screen. The bottom panel shows the design for one complete cycle in this experiment. In each run the face background is present throughout the duration of the entire run. The run was divided into 10 alterations of a 12 s block in which subjects made small fixation saccades localized in the center of the image, followed by a 12 s block in which subjects made large saccades that followed either a typical or atypical scanpath.