Incidental memory for parts of scenes from eye movements

Abstract

Incidental memory for parts of scenes was examined in two search experiments and one memory control experiment. Eye movements were recorded during the search experiments and used to select gaze-contingent sections from search scenes for a surprise memory recognition task. Results from the recognition task showed incidental memory was better for sections viewed longer and with multiple fixations. Sections not fixated during search were still recognized above chance as well. Differences in sections did not affect memory performance in a control experiment when viewing time was held constant. These results show that memory for parts of scenes can occur incidentally during search and encoding of tested sections is better with longer viewing time and with multiple fixations.

Keywords:

• Incidental memory
• Eye movements
• Visual search
• Scene perception
• Visual attention

We thank Carrick Williams, Joseph Schmidt, Fernanda Ferreira, Amit Almor, and the reviewers for their helpful comments. We also thank Jessica Mack, Matthew Nies, and Mackenzie Sunday for assistance with data collection. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation [grant number BCS-1151358].

We thank Carrick Williams, Joseph Schmidt, Fernanda Ferreira, Amit Almor, and the reviewers for their helpful comments. We also thank Jessica Mack, Matthew Nies, and Mackenzie Sunday for assistance with data collection. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation [grant number BCS-1151358].

Notes

¹ Scan Path Ratio (SPR) is a measurement used in eye movement research to examine how directly the eyes move to a target. Especially within memory studies, the scan path ratio has been used to show more directed searches for a target location (Brockmole & Henderson, 2006a; Henderson et al., 1999).

² As defined by Grier (1971), A′ statistics are based on the percentage of correct responses to previously encountered items, hit rate (h), and the percentage of false alarms (f), which are affirmative responses to novel items.

An A′ of 1 equates to correctly responding to items previously encountered before, while an A′ of 0.5 relates to random guessing.

³ For Experiment 3, “yes/remembered” responses were used as hit rates for A′ calculations across all conditions to represent recognition performance for the most-, least-, and nonviewed conditions and false recognition performance for the foil images. Conventionally, hit rate refers to the percentage of correct responses and false alarm rate refers to the percentage of correct rejections. Regarding the foil sections, hit rate and false alarm rates were switching when calculating A′ so hit rates were the f-variable and false alarm rates were the h-variable from the equation in Footnote 2.