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Eye movements at encoding predict episodic memory in distinct ways for social and non-social information

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 3:00 – 5:00 pm, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Veronica Dudarev¹ (vdudarev@mail.ubc.ca), James Enns¹, Connor Kerns¹, Daniela Palombo¹; ¹University of British Columbia

It is intuitive that we remember what we look at most directly better than what we glance at only briefly. Yet studies of associative memory, where participants are asked to remember arbitrary associations between images, show that this relationship is more complex. While eye fixations do predict item memory, associative memory is either not related to fixations or predicted by them to a limited extent. One possibility is that the eye fixations reflect multiple cognitive processes, making it challenging to find simple links between looking and remembering. To address this possibility, we compared memory for images of people whose facial expressions and body postures were informative for picture understanding (social) or not (non-social). Half the images in each set were either emotionally neutral or negative. In addition to measuring picture recognition, we used two novel eye-tracking indices: gaze binding (saccades between the target and context images) and processing complexity (fixation duration). The results replicated the emotional memory tunneling effect found in many previous studies, but also yielded two novel findings. First, social images revealed lower processing complexity and were recognized and contextualized more accurately than non-social images. Second, gaze binding was predictive of associative memory for social, but not non-social images. Among non-social images, complexity of processing best predicted associative memory. We propose that social images are processed more efficiently than non-social images, and that associative retention depends less on the eye fixations made to the images than on the ease and the kind of information processing elicited by them.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic