The eyes as pointers to serial memory

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Memory is a critical component of human cognition and current research is increasingly recognizing the vital role played by eye-movements in the memory process. Retaining information about where pertinent objects are in a changing visual environment underpins numerous complex everyday tasks. For example, while driving it is important to be able to retain and retrieve information about relevant features about the external and internal environment. This may include the general position of objects, buildings and people, the speed and position of traffic, information on place signs, the controls and information on displays within a car. This project will address the question of whether the control and distribution of eye movements reflects mental processes beyond the visual encoding of task-relevant information (the mind-eye hypothesis) and whether the disposition of the eyes, even after an item has disappeared from view, can be used to predict whether the space in which the item was present is remembered or forgotten. It will shed light on long-standing and fundamental questions about the nature of capacity-limits in visuo-spatial short-term memory (STM) and the sources of forgetting, whether by decay of the memory or interference from subsequent events. The project will use innovative eye-tracking techniques, combined with performance measures, to map the movement of the eyes to key cognitive components of memory. Results will inform the debate on the nature of STM, its limitations, and the sources of forgetting from visuo-spatial memory. They will impose important constraints on efforts to produce formal, computational or mathematical, models of memory. One theoretical contribution will be to establish whether memory has a fixed capacity limit or is flexible in the sense that resources can be allocated strategically across to-be-remembered items and tasks. Another major contribution will be to determine whether decay of the engram (memory trace) or interference from subsequent activity is the most important source of forgetting with visuo-spatial memory. Yet a third theoretical contribution will be to test an alternative to the classic modular and object-based views of STM by considering whether memory can, alternatively, be understood through the perception of stimuli and the planning of (oculomotor) actions and a fourth outcome will be an indication of the extent to which conceptually similar processes, such as "gestural" rehearsal (well-established within verbal memory, in the form of articulatory rehearsal), operate in parallel across different sensory modalities (e.g., vision).