27 Influence of initial fixation position Balanced Pattern Left Focus Right Focus 80 100 120 140 160 80 100 120 140 160 Star ting Left Starting Right Mean squared distance to data [°^2] Model Gauss Model Density Model Scene W alk Model Model Reduced Inhibition Saccadic Momentum Model Figure 9 . Mean squared distance of the model curves to the experimental data between 1.36 and 5 seconds. Either the original or the adjusted version of the Scene walk model perform best in all conditions. Errorbars represent the standard error of the mean. sampling from the empirical saliency map (i.e., assuming a ‘perfect’ saliency model) does not replicate human behavior, since the overshoot to the opposite side of the image can- not be reproduced. Moreover, such a model is psychologically highly implausible because of the missing effect of degraded visual acuity towards the periphery of the visual field. However, an augmented model, i.e., a combination of the density map with a Gaussian attention window representing the fall-off of acuity to the periphery, performs even worse compared to random sampling from the empirical saliency map. We conclude from these results that an active mechanism driving the eyes away from the starting position is nec-