Remembering what we've seen: Predicting recollective experience from eye movements when viewing everyday scenes
Peter Chapman · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2005
Recent research into change-blindness, memory-free visual search, and related phenomena have led some researchers to suggest that virtually no visual information is retained from individual fixations. This chapter reviews a number of studies that have recorded eye movements and subsequent visual memory in both laboratory and field settings. It concludes that while visual memory is sometimes quite poor, it is by no means absent in most situations. In most applied settings, records of people's eye movements will prove highly predictive of later memory performance. Factors such as emotional stress and danger which have been found to systematically distort people's memory for situations generally do so because they also distort people's eye movements. Nonetheless there is clear evidence that long-term memories are formed for items that have never been fixated directly, and there is also evidence for important differences in memory amongst different items that have been fixated.