Why and when do you look away when trying to remember? Gaze aversion as a marker of the attentional switch to the internal world during memory retrieval

A systematic review of eye movements during autobiographical recall: Does the mind's eye look at pictures of personal memories?

Retrieving personal memories is usually accompanied by eye movements. Although the functional significance of eye movements during retrieval is relatively well established in the case of episodic memory, their role in autobiographical memory is not clearly delineated in the literature. This systematic review critically examines existing studies in the field to summarize the current understanding of eye movements during autobiographical recall, leading to three conclusions. First, eye movements can be taken to reflect the retrieval of mental visual images in autobiographical memory. Second, eye movements may serve a functional role and support recall by helping retrieve visual details of the memory. Third, eye movements appear to be modulated by various aspects of the retrieval process, suggesting that they could meaningfully reflect aspects of the cognitive processes at play. The discussion highlights the major limitations of current research and proposes suggestions for future studies that will allow developing a more robust theoretical framework.

Does familiarity-detection flip attention inward? The familiarity-flip-of-attention account of the primacy effect in memory for repetitions

In cognitive psychology, research on attention is shifting from focusing primarily on how people orient toward stimuli in the environment toward instead examining how people orient internally toward memory representations. With this new shift the question arises: What factors in the environment send attention inward? A recent proposal is that one factor is cue familiarity-detection (Cleary, Irving & Mills, Cognitive Science, 47, e13274, 2023). Within this theoretical framework, we reinterpret a decades-old empirical pattern-a primacy effect in memory for repetitions-in a novel way. The effect is the finding that altered repetitions of an image were remembered as re-occurrences of the first presentation despite having a changed left-right orientation; participants better retained the first orientation while incorrectly remembering changed instantiations as repetitions of the first orientation (DiGirolamo & Hintzman, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4, 121-124, 1997). We argue that this pattern, which has never been fully explained, is an existing empirical test of the newly proposed mechanism of cue familiarity-detection flipping attention inward toward memory. Specifically, an image's first appearance is novel so draws attention outward toward encoding the stimulus' attributes like orientation; subsequent mirror-reversed appearances are detected as familiar so flip attention inward toward memory search, which leads to 1) inattentional blindness for the changed orientation due to the familiarity-driven shift of attention inward and 2) memory retrieval of the first instance and its orientation, thereby enhancing memory for the first instance and its previously encoded attributes like orientation.

Internal coupling: Eye behavior coupled to visual imagery

Our eyes do not only respond to visual perception but also to internal cognition involving visual imagery, which can be referred to as internal coupling. This review synthesizes evidence on internal coupling across diverse domains including episodic memory and simulation, visuospatial memory, numerical cognition, object movement, body movement, and brightness imagery. In each domain, eye movements consistently reflect distinct aspects of mental imagery typically akin to those seen in corresponding visual experiences. Several findings further suggest that internal coupling may not only coincide with but also supports internal cognition as evidenced by improved cognitive performance. Available theoretical accounts suggest that internal coupling may serve at least two functional roles in visual imagery: facilitating memory reconstruction and indicating shifts in internal attention. Moreover, recent insights into the neurobiology of internal coupling highlight substantially shared neural pathways in externally and internally directed cognition. The review concludes by identifying open questions and promising avenues for future research such as exploring moderating roles of context and individual differences in internal coupling.

Characterizing Learners' Complex Attentional States During Online Multimedia Learning Using Eye-tracking, Egocentric Camera, Webcam, and Retrospective recalls

As online learning becomes increasingly ubiquitous, a key challenge is maintaining learners' sustained attention. Using eye-tracking, together with observing and interviewing learners, we can characterize both 1) whether they are looking at their learning materials, and 2) whether they are thinking about them. Critically, eye-tracking only speaks to the first distinction, not the second. To overcome this limitation, we supplemented eye-tracking with an egocentric camera, a webcam, a retrospective recall, and mind-wandering probes to capture a 2×2 matrix of attentional/cognitive states. We then categorized N=101 learners' attentional/cognitive states while they completed a multimedia physics module. This meets two goals: 1) allowing basic research to understand the relationship between attentional/cognitive states and behavioral outcomes; and 2) facilitating applied research by generating rich ground truth for future use in training machine learning to categorize this 2×2 set of attentional states, for which eye-tracking is necessary, but not sufficient.

Decoupling of the pupillary light response during internal attention: The modulating effect of luminance intensity

In a world full of sensory stimuli, attention guides us between the external environment and our internal thoughts. While external attention involves processing sensory stimuli, internal attention is devoted to self-generated representations such as planning or spontaneous mind wandering. They both draw from common cognitive resources, thus simultaneous engagement in both often leads to interference between processes. In order to maintain internal focus, an attentional mechanism known as perceptual decoupling takes effect. This mechanism supports internal cognition by decoupling attention from the perception of sensory information. Two previous studies of our lab investigated to what extent perceptual decoupling is evident in voluntary eye movements. Findings showed that the effect is mediated by the internal task modality and workload (visuospatial > arithmetic and high > low, respectively). However, it remains unclear whether it extends to involuntary eye behavior, which may not share cognitive resources with internal activities. Therefore, the present experiment aimed to further elucidate attentional dynamics by examining whether internal attention affects the pupillary light response (PLR). Specifically, we consistently observed that workload and task modality of the internal task reduced the PLR to luminance changes of medium intensity. However, the PLR to strong luminance changes was less or not at all affected by the internal task. These results suggest that perceptual decoupling effects may be less consistent in involuntary eye behavior, particularly in the context of a salient visual stimulus.