Automatically Identifying the Human Sense of Familiarity Using Eye Gaze Features

Familiarity is a common subjective human experience. It can occur when recognizing a person’s face as familiar yet being unable to place where that person was seen before, or when sensing that a certain place is familiar, as if perhaps it has been visited before. The feeling of familiarity can occur even when an individual is unable to identify why a situation feels familiar, and it can happen even when a situation is actually new, as occurs in déjà vu [10]. Automatically detecting the internal state of familiarity is a relatively unexplored topic. The present work used an existing methodological paradigm from cognitive psychology to achieve automatic detection of the internal state of familiarity using eye gaze measures, including in virtual reality environments. Being able to detect the sense of familiarity as an internal subjective state could have applied uses like developing intelligent virtual tutoring systems.