Remembering Pictures of Real-World Images Using Eye Fixation Sequences in Imagery and in Recognition

Two experiments examined the eye movements made when remembering pictures of real-world objects and scenes, and when those images are imagined rather than inspected. In Experiment 1 arrays of simple objects were first shown, and eye movements used to indicate the location of an object declared as having been present in the array. Experiment 2 investigated the similarity of eye fixation scanpaths between the initial encoding of a picture of a real-world scene and a second viewing of a picture and when trying to imagine that picture using memory. Closer similarities were observed between phases that involved more similar tasks, and the scanpaths were just as similar when the task was presented immediately or after two days. The possibility raised by these results is that images can be retrieved from memory by re-instating the sequence of fixations made during their initial encoding.

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