Divided attention narrows visual exploration in ways that differentially impact item and relational encoding

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Heather Lucas¹ (hlucas2@lsu.edu), Chloe Kindell¹; ¹Louisiana State University

Visual exploration is essential for memory formation, but many factors can impact the quantity and quality of eye movements deployed during memory tasks. Here we examine how attentional resource availability impacts viewing patterns during study, as well as whether these effects differ when the goal is to memorize item identities versus item-location bindings. In two experiments, participants viewed a series of multi-item displays while eye movements were recorded, each followed by either a spatial reconstruction test (Exp 1) or an item recognition test (Exp 2). Attentional resource availability was manipulated by varying the difficulty of a concurrent auditory task. In Experiment 1, higher secondary task difficulty impaired spatial reconstruction and led to more constrained study-phase viewing, which was characterized by fewer fixations, longer fixation durations, and lower scanpath entropy relative to lower secondary task difficulty. By contrast, item recognition in Experiment 2 was unaffected by cognitive load. Fixation durations and scanpath entropy also remained stable in Experiment 2, though fixation counts slightly decreased in the higher-load condition. Across-experiment analyses further revealed that participants in Experiment 2 exhibited more constrained viewing strategies than those in Experiment 1 regardless of load, highlighting parallels between the way viewers adjust to changes in cognitive load and task demands. Overall, these findings indicate that divided attention narrows visual exploration during memory tasks, and that this narrowing can have the effect of reducing item-location binding but preserving the encoding of item-level details.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic