Eye movements support memory retrieval

Eye movements help us bring detailed, visual information into our memories. In turn, memories influence where we move our eyes: how we view the world changes based on our past experiences. This interaction between the oculomotor and memory systems occurs in a reciprocal manner, on a moment-to-moment basis. In this talk, I will share some of our recent work that suggests that eye movements don’t simply passively reveal what we remember; rather, our findings show that eye movements help reconstruct rich, vivid, spatiotemporal details in service of novel mental constructions and recall, particularly of autobiographical details. Functional and effective connectivity findings from fMRI paradigms that contrast naturalistic viewing with restricted (fixed) viewing show how eye movements serve to organize information flow in the brain, specifically to and from the hippocampus, allowing for the retrieval and reconstruction of details from memory. Our findings speak more broadly to issues of the role of the hippocampus in binding, comparison, and prediction, and argue that eye movements are a natural effector system to support the functions of the hippocampal memory system.

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Online: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/86341478817