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Incidental visual attention and subsequent memory for landmarks during real-world navigation

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

Lensky Augustin¹ (), Alireza Kazemi¹, Luis Garcia¹, Uros Topalovic², Mauricio Vallejo Martelo², Matthias Stangl², Tyler Davis¹, Martina Hollearn¹, Justin Campbell¹, Kiersten Olson¹, Dawn Eliashiv¹, Vikram Rao³, Itzhak Fried², Nick Hasulak⁴, Sonja Hiller², Nanthia Suthana², Cory Inman¹; ¹University of Utah, ²UCLA, David Geffen School of Medicine, ³UCSF Department of Neurology, ⁴Phoenix Research Consulting

Every day experience in the real world is a dynamic, continuous stream of information, processed through the attention system and stored in long-term memory. However, our cognitive resources are finite. Thus, our visual attention selectively encodes information for later retrieval of memories associated with specific experiences.Traditionally, studies of memory using eye-tracking have used images presented on a computer screen to assess the effects of visual attention on later memory for images. Wearable eye-tracking glasses offer the opportunity to evaluate visual attention in complex, dynamic, and real-world environments without constraints from laboratory settings. Using a wearable eye-tracking device synchronized with direct hippocampal recordings, the present study examines how visual attention influences our ability to subsequently remember landmarks during real-world navigation. Five participants with intractable epilepsy, surgically implanted with NeuroPace Responsive Neurostimulators recording hippocampal local field potentials (LFPs), wore mobile eye-trackers to learn a 0.75-mile indoor-outdoor route. On Day 1, participants completed a guided-navigation walk with several subsequent self-guided retrieval walks. On Day 2, more self-guided retrieval walks were completed along with a surprise recognition task for the landmarks on the route. Eye-movement results revealed that the participants demonstrated incidental encoding for the landmarks on the route without explicit memory instructions. Longer and more frequent fixations on landmarks during natural navigation were predictive of successful memory encoding and later retrieval particularly on the initial, second, and final walks before the recognition task. Post-test visual attention was modulated by landmark recognition outcomes, indicating top-down memory-driven guidance of attention. Overall, these findings replicate results found in controlled laboratory settings and open new opportunities for understanding visual attention and memory in the wild.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic