Schedule of Events | Symposia

Flexible gaze reinstatement during working memory for natural scenes

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 2 - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT, Independence Ballroom.

Yueying Dong¹ (yud070@ucsd.edu), Sihan Yang¹, Yun-Chen Hung¹, Anastasia Kiyonaga¹; ¹University of California, San Diego

Prominent working memory (WM) models assert that feature-specific WM content is stored in sensorimotor cortical activations, and newer evidence suggests that even peripheral oculomotor signals carry WM information. For instance, during a WM delay, small gaze biases veer toward locations in memorized visual space. Yet the specificity and functional relevance of such oculomotor WM signatures is unclear. In long term memory, gaze patterns at retrieval have been found to recapitulate the spatiotemporal pattern from encoding, and the degree of such gaze reinstatement may functionally relate to performance. Here, we ask whether oculomotor patterns during WM exhibit a similar degree of spatiotemporal specificity and relevance to function. We tracked participants’ eye gaze during encoding and WM maintenance of naturalistic images, and we manipulated whether they would be tested on the visual or semantic features of the image. In two experiments, we found that gaze patterns during a blank WM delay resembled the spatiotemporal sequence of eye movements observed during visual encoding of the same image. Gaze patterns during WM may therefore track the identity of complex, natural images that are held in mind. Moreover, we found a stronger degree of such WM gaze reinstatement when the task prioritized precise visual information as compared to semantic categories. Peripheral oculomotor signatures of WM content are therefore malleable to how the content will be used. These results highlight a potential role for the earliest levels of visual processing in WM content representation, and suggest that ocular WM signals are functionally flexible to upcoming demands.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory