While viewing pictures a series of eye-movements (saccades) were performed which constitute the so-called scan path. The ideas of how those sequences of fixations are steered by the cognitive system range from saliency based mechanisms up to global and local scanning strategies. The study reported follows the idea that spatial frequency components of image parts influence the sequence of fixations. Within an experiment sinusoidal gratings of different spatial frequencies (0.4 cpd to 7 cpd) were arranged within an image. A series of images in which the position of the different gratings were arranged randomly were shown to 44 participants. Eye-movements were recorded while recipients viewed these compound images. The gaze data were analyzed with regard to the fixation sequence of the different gratings. The results showed that participants tend to fixate gratings with lower spatial frequencies (around 1 cpd) at first. The second glance is merely directed to gratings with much lower spatial frequencies (0.5 cpd) whereas in the following third glance the recipients returned near to the initially inspected frequency band. This finding can be interpreted as a perceptual strategy to inspect at first more global structures. Moreover, before
the initial frequency band is visited again another frequency band is sought out. This observation looks like a spatial frequency related version of the inhibition of return effect.