Eye movements in real-life search are guided by task-irrelevant working-memory content

Abstract

24Attention is automatically guided towards stimuli that match the contents of working memory. 25 This has been studied extensively using simplified computer tasks, but it has never been 26 investigated whether (yet often assumed that) memory-driven guidance also affects real-life 27 search. Here we tested this open question in a naturalistic environment that closely resembles 28 real life. In two experiments, participants wore a mobile eye-tracker, and memorized a color, 29 prior to a search task in which they looked for a target word among book covers on a bookshelf. 30The memory color was irrelevant to the search task. Nevertheless, we found that participants' 31 gaze was strongly guided towards book covers that matched the memory color. Crucially, this 32 memory-driven guidance was evident from the very start of the search period. These findings 33 support that attention is guided towards working-memory content in real-world search, and that 34 this is fast and therefore likely reflecting an automatic process. 35 36 37 Keywords: attentional capture; visual search; working memory; real-life search 157 Kassner et al., 2014) in Experiment 1 and the "Surface Tracker" plugin in Experiment 2 in the 158 Pupil Player software (version 1.18; Kassner et al., 2014) with four square markers. Gaze 159 position was detected by the infrared camera using the "dark pupil" method, and gaze samples 160 on each surface were exported. The timeframes for the start point and end point of each trial 161 were coded based on a visual inspection of the video by CZ. When gaze position seemed to be 162 biased (e.g., systematically just below a book cover), this was manually corrected in a separate 163 document. Gaze Proportion on each book color (i.e. Blue, Yellow, Red and Yellow) relative to 164 the total number of samples of each trial was calculated.