On the Interaction between Gaze Behavior and Physiological Responses when Viewing Garden Scenes

Recent research has shown that design principles inherent in a Japanese style garden can reduce measures of stress in both healthy and dementia patients. However, it was not clear how subjects’ visual interaction with the scene affected their physiological responses. To address that, we developed a novel non-invasive system to collect synchronized measurements of eye gaze and physiological indicators of sympathetic neural activity: the electrocardiogram, the blood volume pulse and the galvanic skin response, as subjects view a garden environment. We characterized the visual engagement of subjects using the average fixation duration, the saccade amplitude and the gaze transition entropy. We find a statistically significant positive correlation between gaze transition entropy and mean heart rate change. Our results suggest that the visual engagement of subjects with their environment may influence their physiological responses to it: more engagement may lead to more relaxation. Our results also highlight the importance of taking into account the detailed spatio-temporal characteristics of the gaze trajectory.