Cognitive Neuroscience Society

The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
MENUMENU
  • Home
  • Annual Meeting
        • General Information
          • What to Expect at CNS 2023
          • CNS 2023 Mobile App
          • CNS 2023 Giveaway
          • CNS 2023 Giveaway Winners
          • Accessibility at CNS
          • General Information
          • Code of Conduct
          • Dates and Deadlines
          • Hotel Reservations
          • Poster Guidelines
          • Poster Printing Discount
          • Annual Meeting Workshop Policy & Application
          • Exhibit with us!
        • Program
          • Thank you to our Partners
          • CNS 2023 Program Booklet
          • Schedule Overview
          • Program-at-a-Glance
          • CNS 30th Anniversary Dance Party
          • Keynote Address
          • George A. Miller Awardee
          • Distinguished Career Contributions Awardee
          • Young Investigator Awardees
          • CNS at 30: Perspectives on the Roots, Present, and Future of Cognitive Neuroscience
          • Invited-Symposium Sessions
          • Symposium Sessions
          • Data Blitz Session Schedule
          • Poster Schedule & Session Information
          • JoCN Travel Fellowship Award
          • GSA/PFA Award Winners
          • Workshops, Socials & Special Events
        • Registration
          • Registration
          • Registration FAQ
          • Registration Policies, Cancellations & Refunds
        • News/Press
          • CNS 2023 Press Room
          • CNS 2022 Blog
          • CNS 2021 Blog
          • CNS 2020 Blog
        • Submissions
          • 2023 Poster Printing Discount
          • Submission Requirements
          • Submit a Poster
          • Submit a Symposium
          • GSA or PFA Application
          • Data Blitz
          • Frequently Asked Submission Questions
        • Archive
          • CNS 2020 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2019 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2018 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2017 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2016 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2015 Conference Videos
          • Previous Meetings Programs & Abstracts
  • About CNS
    • Boards and Committees
    • CNS Statement: Black Lives Matter
  • Membership
    • Information and Benefits
    • Join or Renew Membership
    • Membership FAQs
    • Member Discounts
    • Newsletter
      • Submit an Announcement
      • Current Newsletter
      • Newsletter FAQs
      • Past Newsletters
  • Awards
    • George A. Miller Award
    • Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions Award
    • Young Investigator Award
    • Young Investigator Award Nominations
    • 2023 YIA Nomination Form
    • JoCN Travel Fellowship Award
  • News Center
    • CNS Blog
    • CNS 2023 Press Room
    • CNS 2023 Blog
    • CNS 2022 Blog
    • CNS 2021 Blog
    • CNS 2020 Blog
    • CNS 2019 Blog
    • Blog Archives
    • Quick Tips for Getting Started on Twitter
    • Media Contact
  • My CNS
  • Contact Us
post

When Gazing Into Nothing Helps Us Remember

December 23, 2013

credit: Lotus Head from Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

credit: Lotus Head from Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Trying to remember how you arranged last year’s Christmas ornaments on the tree? It turns out that blankly gazing at your empty tree could help. According to a new study, when we look even at an empty space, it cues our brain to remember the orientation of objects that previously occupied that space. Our eye movements thus are key to episodic memory, allowing us to reconstruct imagery from the past.

“Episodic memory allows us to travel back in time to relive previous events from a first-person perspective,” says Mikael Johansson of Lund University in Sweden. “Remembering depends on the interaction between retrieval cues and stored memories.” The more similar the cues are when we try to retrieve the memory as when we first saw it, the more likely we are to remember something.

Johansson, who studies the factors that influence the accessibility of stored memories, teamed up with Roger Johansson, who studies the interplay between eye movements and visual imagery. They wanted to explore the effects on memory retrieval of where and how our eyes look, even if the relevant visual information is no longer available in the immediate surrounding.

credit:Johansson et al.

Study participants had to remember the orientation of 24 different objects; gazing at the empty space an object occupied aided its memory retrieval

The researchers first asked participants to study 24 objects set up in quadrants on a computer screen. The screen then went blank, and the researchers then guided where and how participants looked while they answered questions about the original object arrangement. “Critically, we guided participants to look at positions that either corresponded or didn’t correspond with the original locations of the to-be-retrieved objects,” Johansson says. They used an eye tracker to record participants’ gaze.

As published in Psychological Science, they found that participants were better able to remember spatial properties of objects when they viewed an empty space that corresponded to the original location of the object, as opposed to a different location or just freely viewing the screen. “Although we were optimistic that our experiment would offer novel data,” Johansson says, “we were pleasantly surprised that our results provided clear evidence of a functional role of eye movements and that retrieval performance can either become facilitated or perturbed depending on where you look.”

The experiment showed that where we look affects memory for spatial relations between objects more than memory of intrinsic object features. “We believe that the role of eye movements is similar during episodic remembering as when we look at things in the ‘real world’ – we need to move our eyes to specific locations to explore how different features relate to each other,” Johansson says. “This behavior is not as important when only one feature is in focus.”

One novel aspect to the experiment was in its use of several concurrent objects. “This introduced competition and potential interference between objects,” Johansson says. “Most previous research had only investigated memory for single objects.”

The impact of our eye movements on memory all comes down to context, he says. “It is not the looking at any ‘nothing’ that facilitates remembering, but the looking at a particular ‘nothing,’ the location that spatially overlaps with the to-be-recalled object.”

Johansson and colleagues are now working to combine eye-tracking with electrophysiological measures of brain activity. They want to tease apart the factors that affect gaze behavior, as well as to identify its neural underpinnings.

-Lisa M.P. Munoz

 

By lmunoz Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: memory, visual

Previous article: When We See But Don’t See: Using Illusions to Test Our Perceptions
Next article: Press Registration Open for the CNS 2014 Annual Meeting in Boston

Recent Posts

  • CNS 2023: Day 4 Highlights
  • Psychedelics and Cognition: A New Look
  • CNS 2023: Day 3 Highlights
  • CNS 2023: Day 2 Highlights
  • Forget About It: Investigating How We Purge Thoughts from Our Minds

Blog Archives

Quick Tips for Getting Started on Twitter

Cognitive Neuroscience Society
c/o Center for Mind and Brain
267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA 95618
916-955-6080: for CNS Membership Questions
805-450-7490: for annual meeting questions about- registration, posters, symposium
916-409-5069: Fax Line
email: meeting@cogneurosociety.org

Recent Posts

  • CNS 2023: Day 4 Highlights
  • Psychedelics and Cognition: A New Look
  • CNS 2023: Day 3 Highlights
  • CNS 2023: Day 2 Highlights
  • Forget About It: Investigating How We Purge Thoughts from Our Minds

Archives

Blog Archives

Previous Meeting Programs and Abstracts

Past Newsletters

All contents © Cognitive Neuroscience Society 1995-2019

Add to Calendar

Add to Calendar
04/16/2022 11:00 AM
04/16/2022 12:00 PM
America/Los_Angeles
How Prior Knowledge Shapes Encoding of New Memories
Description of the event
Grand Ballroom A
Create an Account

Login Utility