Covert shifts of attention can account for the functional role of “eye movements to nothing”

Abstract

When trying to remember verbal information from memory, people look at spatial locations that have been associated with visual stimuli during encoding, even when the visual stimuli are no longer present. It has been shown that such "eye movements to nothing" can influence retrieval performance for verbal information, but the mechanism underlying this functional relationship is unclear. More precisely, covert in comparison to overt shifts of attention could be sufficient to elicit the observed differences in retrieval performance. To test if covert shifts of attention explain the functional role of the looking-at-nothing phenomenon, we asked participants to remember verbal information that had been associated with a spatial location during an encoding phase. Additionally, during the retrieval phase, all participants solved an unrelated visual tracking task that appeared in either an associated (congruent) or an incongruent spatial location. Half the participants were instructed to look at the tracking task, half to shift their attention covertly (while keeping the eyes fixed). In two experiments, we found that memory retrieval depended on the location to which participants shifted their attention covertly. Thus, covert shifts of attention seem to be sufficient to cause differences in retrieval performance. The results extend the literature on the relationship between visuospatial attention, eye movements, and verbal memory retrieval and provide deep insights into the nature of the looking-at-nothing phenomenon.

Less imageable words lead to more looks to blank locations during memory retrieval

“…We did not present any evidence that looking at nothing has a functional role in memory. However, a number of studies demonstrated that looking at relevant, blank locations improves memory performance for both verbal and visual information (Johansson & Johansson, 2014;Scholz et al, 2018Scholz et al, , 2016. What lies behind this discrepancy?…”

“…Another possibility could be the difference in verbal information to be retrieved. In Scholz et al (2011Scholz et al ( , 2016Scholz et al ( , 2018, participants encoded longer verbal information (i.e., factual sentences) and in the retrieval phase, a true/false statement probed participants' memory. In our study, however, participants were asked to encode four single nouns shown simultaneously and memory was probed with another single noun.…”

“…There is evidence that additional visual processing within the looking at nothing paradigm has consequences both on memory performance and eye movements. For example, in Scholz, Klichowicz and Krems (2018), participants were asked to judge the truth of a sentence they had encoded in a grid location. At the same time, they were asked to attend a visual tracking task (Thomas & Lleras, 2009).…”

Where to attend next: guiding refreshing of visual, spatial, and verbal representations in working memory

“…It is unclear whether eye movements are desirable in the context of this task. On the one hand, some studies have shown that looking at the locations previously occupied by memory items is associated with improved memory retrieval . On the other hand, eye movements can hamper spatial WM performance .…”

Retro-cueing in multi-attribute choices: The influence of memory availability on strategy selection and attribute weights

“…The memory literature has extensively explored the fact that cueing the spatial location of previously presented information increases visual attention to this position and the likelihood of this information being retrieved from memory . Recent research showed that this retro-cue effect also applies to verbal material (Krefeld-Schwalb, 2018) and can best be described as a shift of attention between representations stored in memory (Scholz, Klichowicz, & Krems, 2018). Beyond that, Platzer et al (2014) showed that retro-cueing even affects choice behavior in multi-attribute inferences from memory.…”