Abstract
Little is known about how memory resources are allocated in natural vision across sequential eye movements and fixations, as people actively extract information from the visual environment. Here, we used gaze-contingent eye tracking to examine how such resources are dynamically reallocated from old to new information entering working memory. As participants looked sequentially at items, we interrupted the process at different times by extinguishing the display as a saccade was initiated. After a brief interval, participants were probed on one of the items that had been presented. Paradoxically, across all experiments, the final (unfixated) saccade target was recalled more precisely when more items had previously been fixated, that is, with longer rather than shorter saccade sequences. This result is difficult to explain on current models of working memory because recall error, even for the final item, is typically higher as memory load increases. The findings could however be accounted for by a model that describes how resources are dynamically reallocated on a moment-by-moment basis. During each saccade, the target is encoded by consuming a proportion of currently available resources from a limited working memory, as well as by reallocating resources away from previously encoded items. These findings reveal how working memory resources are shifted across memoranda in active vision.
Highlights
Working memory (WM) is the ability to temporarily hold and manipulate information “in mind.” WM provides the “workbench” for higher cognition, such as thinking, planning, and problem-solving (Hambrick & Engle, 2003)
Saccadic behavior during WM encoding and maintenance can be used to identify the encoding strategy used (Ballard et al, 1995; Meghanathan et al, 2019), or the trade-off between maintenance and further sampling (Draschkow et al, 2021) allowing participants to freely refixate the locations of maintained items benefits maintenance, suggesting that saccades are involved in a spatial rehearsal mechanism (Pearson et al, 2014)
The findings presented here show how serial visual WM operates under more natural conditions than traditionally investigated
Summary
Working memory (WM) is the ability to temporarily hold and manipulate information “in mind.” WM provides the “workbench” for higher cognition, such as thinking, planning, and problem-solving (Hambrick & Engle, 2003). Paradigms that have taken into consideration the participant’s natural saccadic behavior have much greater ecological validity than the standard WM paradigms described earlier, because they allow participants to move their eyes in a more natural way akin to how they might in everyday life These approaches allow questions to be asked such as how fixation duration and position affects encoding (Irwin & Zelinsky, 2002), how saccades support scene perception (Unema et al, 2005), and how memory and active vision interact (van der Stigchel & Hollingworth, 2018). The latter have been instructive in studies of visual WM where stimuli are presented either simultaneously, or sequentially at fixation (Gorgoraptis et al, 2011; Ma et al, 2014)
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