Scanpath components reveal how eye movement reinstatements differentially contribute to episodic remembering

• An extensive body of research has shown that episodic remembering involves spontaneous eye movements that largely reproduce the gaze patterns that were present during encoding (e.g., Brandt & Stark, 1997; Johansson et al., 2012). Recent work has further shown that fixation locations that overlap between encoding and recall promote cortical episodic reconstruction (Bone et al., 2018; Johansson et al., 2018) and successful remembering (Johansson & Johansson, 2014). While such findings indicate that gaze location plays an active role during episodic reconstruction, the unfolding scanpaths also encompass more complex information over and above simple gaze locations, such as order, direction, shape, length and duration. Virtually nothing is known about how such spatio-temporal components contribute to episodic reconstruction. The present study investigated the encoding-retrieval overlap in scanpaths for 60 participants who encoded and recalled 36 visuospatial stimuli of two types: scenes and object arrangements. Results replicate and extend previous findings, by analyzing scanpath reinstatement over a multitude of spatio-temporal components. Critically, by combining subjective ratings of memory quality with a surprise test of forced-choice recognition, we demonstrate how such components contribute to successful remembering to different extents, and in different ways depending on the stimulus type. Results indicate that scanpath shape contributes to reconstructing the global scene structure whereas scanpath position, order and direction contribute to reconstructing the arrangement of individual objects in a spatial context. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic demonstration of how eye movement reinstatements contribute to episodic remembering in a multifaceted way.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Psykologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Psychology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Memory

Eye Movements

Publication and Content Type

kon (subject category)

ref (subject category)