Eye movement might be key to replaying our visual memories

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-06-15 09:01

International

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Eye movement might be key to replaying our visual memories, according to international researchers. The team analysed the eye movements of people as they viewed an image that they were later asked to recall. They found that when asked to recall the memory, participants had higher quality of recall if there was a significant overlap between the eye movements when viewing the image, and the eye movements when remembering it. The researchers say that this suggests that eye movements are important for reconstructing memories.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Eye-movement replay supports episodic remembering

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Over 50 years ago Donald Hebb, the forefather of cognitive neuroscience, posited that oculomotor movements of the eye underpin our ability to mentally recreate visuospatial relations during episodic remembering. By replaying the eye movements that were established when the original perceptual experience was visually “sampled”, our memories are reconstructed across time and space. Here we present direct evidence for this influential claim, by utilizing a state-of-the-art scanpath-comparison technique, capturing distinct spatiotemporal properties of eye movements during encoding and recall. We demonstrate that the fidelity with which a scanpath is sequentially reinstated, is predictive of the quality of the recalled memory.

Journal/
conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Lund University, Sweden

Funder: The work was funded by the Swedish Research Council grant no. 2015-01206 (Roger Johansson) and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation award MAW2015.0043 (Mikael Johansson).

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