Memory for structural information across eye movements

Abstract

The visual world extends before us in all directions, but there are limitations on how much of the world can be perceived at any one time. To compensate, the eyes move around from point to point in space, and can be directed to objects or regions of interest. Since information is picked up from the world only during eye fixations, these intervening eye movements (i.e., saccades) disrupt the inflow of information, thereby requiring that the information received from the world be combined across separate eye fixations. Memory for information retained from one fixation to the next has been called transsaccadic memory. Previous research has demonstrated that visual information is retained transsaccadically at a more abstract level than a point-by-point buffer. The results of 3 experiments using different tasks show that one of the ways in which visual information is represented is in the form of structural descriptions, and that these structural descriptions are used in transsaccadic memory in the same manner as they are used in visual short term memory. These results lend support to the idea that the memory store that retains information transsaccadically is in fact visual short term memory (Irwin, 1991).U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio