Comparative Search Reveals the Tradeoff between Eye Movements and Working Memory Use in Visual Tasks
Shantanu Inamdar, Marc Pomplun · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2003
The experiments reported here provide an insight into how the use of working memory is influenced when eye movements become 'costlier' in a visual task.In our comparative search paradigm, each half of the screen contains a column of simple geometrical objects of three sizes and forms.Participants have to detect whether the two halves of the screen are exactly identical or contain a difference.The eye movement data recorded from two experiments provides evidence for a working memory versus eye movement tradeoff.Visual working memory use -within capacity limits -is flexibly adapted to optimize task performance for varying costs of eye movements.