Points of view: Where do we look when we watch TV?

How is our gaze dispersed across the screen when watching television? An exploratory eyetracker study using a custom-designed show indicated a very strong center-of-screen bias with gazepoints following a roughly normal distribution peaked near screen center. Examining the show across time revealed that people were rarely all looking at the same location, and the amount of gaze dispersion within frames was highly variable. Different forms of programming yielded different levels of dispersion: static network 'bumpers' created the tightest visual groupings, and gaze dispersion for frames with show content was less than the dispersion for commercials. Advertising frames with brand logos generated higher dispersion than the non-branded ad portions, and repeated ads generated higher dispersion than their first-run counterparts.