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Both viewing entropy and hippocampal structure are related to spatial memory success in healthy aging

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Hyeon Jung (Judith) Heselton¹ (), Michael R. Dulas², Hillary Schwarb¹; ¹University of Nebraska - Lincoln, ²Binghamton University

In everyday life, people learn and remember information through the coordinated activity of visual and memory systems. While important for many aspects of relational/associative memory, the hippocampus is essential for the binding/retrieval of spatial information. Recent work has demonstrated that the ways in which individuals deploy directed eye-movements when encoding spatial information is related to later memory for that information. Indeed, young adults with higher viewing entropy at study, show better spatial memory than those with less ordered viewing patterns. Additionally, patients with bilateral hippocampal damage show decreased viewing entropy suggesting that the hippocampus may contribute to organized looking. In the current study, we investigated the relationship between study-time viewing entropy, spatial memory, and hippocampal volume in a group of 50 cognitively healthy middle-aged and older adults (range 45-74 years old; 31 females and 18 males). All participants completed an MRI scan and performed a Spatial Reconstruction Task while eye movements were tracked. On each trial, participants studied the location of five abstract stimuli and were asked to reconstruct the study display after a short delay. Misplacement error was assessed. After controlling for age and sex, misplacement errors were significantly correlated with both viewing entropy and hippocampal volume such that people with more constrained viewing at study and larger hippocampi made smaller memory errors. Furthermore, entropy and hippocampal volume each explained unique variance in memory outcomes. These data suggest that as we age, both hippocampal integrity and organized viewing behaviors during encoding contribute to spatial memory successes and failures.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic