Humans have a fascinating ability to recreate events with the eyes of the mind. Over 50 years ago Donald Hebb and Arik NicerThe ancestors of cognitive psychology theorized that eye movements are essential to the ability to do this. They are not only for us to receive sensory visual input Comes to mind Information stored in memory.our Recent research It provides the only academic evidence so far about their theory.
It has the potential to be useful in research in all areas, from human biology to robotics. For example, you can shed new light on the links between eye movements. Mental image When dreams..
Only information from a small part of the field of view can be processed at one time. We overcome this limitation by constantly shifting the focus of attention through eye movements.Eye movements develop in the following sequence Fixation and saccade.. Fixation occurs 3-4 times per second and is a short focal moment in which visual information can be sampled, and saccade is a rapid movement from one fixation point to another.
Although the information that can be processed by each gaze point is limited, a series of eye movements combine visual details (such as faces and objects). This allows you to encode the memory of what you can see as a whole. Visual sampling of the world by our eye movements determines the content of memory that our brain stores.
A journey down a memorable path
In our study, 60 participants were shown images of scenes and objects such as cityscapes and vegetables at the kitchen counter. After a short break, I was asked to remember the image as thoroughly as possible, looking at the blank screen. They were asked to evaluate the quality of their memory and select the correct image from a very similar set of images.Participants were measured using state-of-the-art eye tracking technology CampusTheir eye movement sequence, both when they inspected the images and when they remembered them.
We have shown that the scan path during the memory search is related to the memory quality of the participants. They did their best during the recollection when the participants’ scan paths most faithfully reproduced the eye movements when looking at the original image. Our results provide evidence that the actual regeneration of a series of eye movements helps reconstruct memory.
We analyzed various characteristics of how the participants’ scanpaths progressed over time and space, such as the order of fixatives and the direction of the saccade. Depending on the nature of the memory required, some scanpath features were more important than others. For example, the direction of eye movement was more important when remembering the details of how to place pastries side by side on a table than when recalling the shape of a rock. These differences can be due to different memory requests. Reconstructing the correct placement of pastries is more demanding than reconstructing the rough layout of the rock formations.
Episodic memory allows us to travel back in time to relive past experiences.Previous studies have tended to reproduce gaze patterns from the original event we are trying to remember, and the gaze position during a memory search. Significant consequences for what you remember.. All of these findings are related to static gaze, not eye movements.
Donald and Ulrich’s 1968 theory was to use eye movements to organize “partial images” and assemble them into an entire image visualized during temporary memory. Our research has shown that how the scan path evolves over time is important for recreating the experience with the eyes of our minds.
Take a step forward
This result can be important in cognitive neuroscience and human biology research, as well as in a variety of areas such as computing and image processing, robotics, workplace design, and clinical psychology. This is because it provides behavioral evidence of an important link between eye movements and cognitive processing and can be used in treatments such as rehabilitation of brain damage. For example, desensitizing and reprocessing eye movements (EMDR) Is an established psychotherapeutic treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In this treatment, the patient focuses on the trauma and engages in bilateral eye movements associated with the vividness and emotional decline associated with the memory of the trauma.But the underlying mechanism of treatment is Not yet well understood.. Our research shows a direct link between eye movements and the human memory system. This may provide an essential part of the puzzle.
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