Eye movements as indices of spatial and associative memory

Abstract

Previous research has shown that eye movements can serve as an indirect indicator of relational memory. The goal of the current research was to assess how eye movements coincide with different forms of spatial and associative memory. Young adults encoded object-scene combinations and were subsequently presented with repeated, novel, and manipulated scenes. The manipulated object-scene combinations included object additions and deletions (Experiment 1), a change in the location of the object (Experiment 2), or a change in object-scene combinations (Experiment 3). In Experiment 1, participants allocated more fixations to the critical region of a scene when a novel object was added to a scene versus previously presented within the scene; this effect could be supported by either item or relational memory. By contrast, participants did not preferentially view the region of the scene that an object previously occupied when objects were removed from the scene. For Experiments 2 and 3, participants allocated proportionally more fixations towards the critical region of manipulated than repeated scenes when the location of the object or object-scene combination was changed. These findings provide further support for eye movements reflecting relational memory and highlight the importance of data disaggregation for future studies of relational memory.