Scanpath analysis provides a powerful window into visual behavior by jointly capturing the spatial organization and temporal dynamics of gaze. By linking perception, cognition, and oculomotor control, scanpaths offer rich insights into how individuals explore visual scenes and accomplish task goals. Despite decades of research, however, the field remains methodologically fragmented, with a wide diversity of representations and comparison metrics that complicate interpretation and methodological choice. This article reviews computational approaches for the characterization and comparison of scanpaths, with an explicit focus on their underlying assumptions, interpretability, and practical implications. We first survey representations and metrics designed to describe individual scanpaths, ran…

Discussion The present review highlights both the methodological richness and the persistent fragmentation of the approaches used to characterize and compare scanpaths. Despite several decades of active research, scanpath analysis still lacks unified conceptual frameworks that clearly indicate when and why specific representations or metrics should be preferred. Scanpaths are inherently multidimensional entities, jointly embedding spatial, temporal, and semantic information. However, most existing methods focus on only one or two of these dimensions, and genuinely integrative approaches that account for the full complexity of the oculomotor signal remain relatively scarce. A recurring challenge concerns the balance between intuitive, visually interpretable representations—such as scanpath plots, attention maps, or RQA recurrence plots—and more abstract quantitative metrics. Visual representations are accessible and powerful tools for exploratory analysis and qualitative comparison, particularly when multiple representations are shown side-by-side using the same gaze data. However, they provide only coarse-grained insight without formal quantification, and their interpretive value d…

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