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Eye-movement pattern reveals optimal mental organization during memory encoding and maintenance

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Qiaoli Huang1 (qiaolihuang0818@gmail.com), Christian Doeller1,2; 1Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 2Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Center for Neural Computation, The Egil and Pauline Braathen and Fred Kavli Center for Cortical Microcircuits, Jebsen Center for Alzheimer’s Disease, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

We have limited attentional and memory resources, which restricts what we can process and remember. Efficient coding theory argues that resource limitations are mitigated by efficient representational codes that are optimized with regard to the specific stimulus statistics of the environment. Eye movements are involved in the active exploration of the external and internal mental world, which for instance reflect memory content, spatial relations of scenes and relational structure of concepts. Here we are interested in whether eye movements support the optimal mental organization to efficiently hold multiple information in working memory. To answer this question, three gratings with different colors (ranging from green to blue) and frequencies were simultaneously presented at different locations and participants were asked to remember all stimulus information. Crucially, in each trial, grating with relative lower frequency was always associated with green color stimuli. We observed that trials with the same spatial configuration showed higher eye-movement trajectory similarity compared to trials from different spatial configurations both during memory encoding and maintanence periods. This effect was related to behavioral performance. Furthermore, we showed that gaze position moved from the grating with lowest frequency to the middle and then the one with highest frequency, i.e., the shortest mental path, during encoding and maintanence periods, and this sequential eye-movement pattern was also highly related to behavioral performance. These findings provide evidence for the role of eye movements during efficient organisation of information held in working memory and highlight the interplay between processes during memory encoding and maintanence periods to efficiently store multiple information.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory

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March 29–April 1  |  2025

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