Eye-movement replay supports episodic remembering

Abstract

When we bring to mind something we have seen before, our eyes spontaneously reproduce a pattern strikingly similar to that made during the original encounter. Eye-movements can then serve the opposite purpose to acquiring new visual information; they can serve as self-generated cues, pointing to memories already stored. By isolating separable properties within the closely bound chain of where and when we look, we demonstrate that specific components of dynamically reinstated eye-movement sequences, facilitate different aspects of episodic remembering. We also show that the fidelity with which a series of connected eye-movements from initial encoding is reproduced during subsequent retrieval, predicts the quality of the recalled memory. Our findings indicate that eye movements are “replayed” to assemble visuospatial relations as we remember. Distinct dimensions of these scanpaths differentially contribute depending on the goal-relevant memory.

Episodic memory formation in unrestricted viewing

“…Sequential saccadic eye movements organize these relationships, acting themselves as a mechanism that links different aspects of the environment into coherent memory representations (for overviews, see Ryan et al, 2020;Voss et al, 2017). Eye movements also serve an important role during memory retrieval (Damiano and Walther, 2019;Johansson and Johansson, 2014;Johansson et al, 2022;Wynn et al, 2020), and a longstanding theory holds that the stored representations include the sequences of eye movements established during memory formation, which supposedly carry information about linked event elements (Brandt and Stark, 1997;Noton and Stark, 1971).…”