Home » Health » Eye movements may be the missing link in our understanding of memory

Eye movements may be the missing link in our understanding of memory

Humans have an uncanny ability to recreate events in the mind’s eye in great detail. More than 50 years ago, Donald Hebb dan Ulrich NesserThe predecessors of cognitive psychology postulated that eye movements are essential to our ability to do so. They note that we move our eyes not only to receive visual sensory input, but also remind Information stored in memory. our recent research Provides the only academic evidence to date for their theory.

Research can help in everything from human biology to robotics. For example, it could explain the relationship between eye movements, mental visualization Dan dream.

We can only process information from a small part of our visual field at a time. We overcome this limitation by constantly shifting our focus through eye movements. The eye movements are revealed sequentially Installation and saccades. Fixation occurs three to four times per second and is a brief moment of focus that allows us to sample visual information, and fast motion is rapid movement from one fixation point to another.

Although only a small amount of information can be processed at each point of fixation, a series of eye movements link visual details together (for example, faces and objects). This allows us to encode the memory of what we can see as a whole. Our visual sampling of the world – through the movements of our eyes – determines the content of the memories our brains store.

A trip down memory lane

In our study, 60 participants were shown pictures of landscapes and objects, such as cityscapes and vegetables on a kitchen table. After a short break, they were asked to remember the picture as accurately as possible while staring at a blank screen. They assessed the quality of their memory and were asked to choose the correct photo from a group of very similar photos. Using the latest eye tracking technology, we measure participants scan pathsequence of eye movements, both when viewing images and when remembering them.

We showed that the scan trajectory during memory retrieval correlated with the memory quality of participants. When the scan track participants meticulously repeated how their eyes moved when they saw the original image, they did their best while remembering. Our results provide evidence that actual re-presentation of eye movement sequences enhances memory reconstruction.

We analyzed various features of how participants’ scan pathways progressed through space and time – such as fixation sequences and orientation of saccades. Some scan path features are more important than others, depending on the nature of the memory required. For example, the direction of eye movement is more important when remembering the details of how cookies are placed side by side on a table than when remembering the shape of a rock formation. This difference can be attributed to different memory requirements. Reconstructing the finer layout of the pastry is more demanding than rebuilding the rough layout of the rock formation.

Episodic memory allows us to mentally travel back in time to relive past experiences. Previous research has shown that we tend to reproduce gazing patterns from the original event we are trying to recall and that gazing positions during memory retrieval have a Consequences are important for what you remember. All of these findings relate to static gaze, not eye movement.

Donald and Ulrich’s 1968 theory was that eye movements are used to organize and assemble “part images” into a complete image that is visualized during episodic memory. Our study shows that the way scan pathways unfold over time is critical for recreating the experience in our eyes.

advanced

These findings may be important for cognitive neuroscience and human biology research and in areas such as computing and image processing, robotics, and workplace design, as well as clinical psychology. This is because they provide behavioral evidence of an important relationship between eye movement and cognitive processing that can be leveraged for treatments such as brain injury rehabilitation. For example, desensitization and reprocessing of eye movements (EMDR) is a well-established psychological treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In this therapy, the patient focuses on the trauma and engages in bilateral eye movements, which are associated with decreased vitality and emotion associated with memory of the trauma. But the basic mechanism of treatment It’s not well understood. Our study shows a direct relationship between eye movements and the human memory system, which could provide a key piece of the puzzle.

This article has been republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons License. Read original article.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.