ArticleMemory & cognition2018
Covert shifts of attention can account for the functional role of "eye movements to nothing".
Article in Memory & cognition, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 51 citations in OpenAlex.
- The role of eye movements and covert shifts of attention in working and long-term memory retrieval.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Gaze patterns during visual mental imagery reflect part-based generation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Identifying similarity- and rule-based processes in quantitative judgments: A multi-method approach combining cognitive modeling and eye tracking.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Gaze dynamics during natural scene memorization and recognition.Cognition · 2025Article
- Tracking Reactivation of Location Information during Memory Strategies: Insights from Eye Movements.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- Gaze Restriction and Reactivation of Place-bound Content Drive Eye Movements During Mental Imagery.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Processing spatial configurations in visuospatial working memory is influenced by shifts of overt visual attention.PloS one · 2023Article
- Eye-movement replay supports episodic remembering.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Pictorial low-level features in mental images: evidence from eye fixations.Psychological research · 2022Article
- The eyes don't have it: Eye movements are unlikely to reflect refreshing in working memory.PloS one · 2022Article
- Information stored in memory affects abductive reasoning.Psychological research · 2021Article
- The prioritization of visuo-spatial associations during mental imagery.Cognitive processing · 2021Article
- Less imageable words lead to more looks to blank locations during memory retrieval.Psychological research · 2020Article
- Regulatory Effects of Reward Anticipation and Target on Attention Processing of Emotional Stimulation.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Task-Irrelevant Features in Visual Working Memory Influence Covert Attention: Evidence from a Partial Report Task.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- The function of "looking-at-nothing" for sequential sensorimotor tasks: Eye movements to remembered action-target locations.Journal of eye movement research · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
When trying to remember verbal information from memory, people look at spatial locations that have been associated with visual stimuli during encoding, even when the visual stimuli are no longer present. It has been shown that such "eye movements to nothing" can influence retrieval performance for verbal information, but the mechanism underlying this functional relationship is unclear. More precisely, covert in comparison to overt shifts of attention could be sufficient to elicit the observed differences in retrieval performance. To test if covert shifts of attention explain the functional role of the looking-at-nothing phenomenon, we asked participants to remember verbal information that had been associated with a spatial location during an encoding phase. Additionally, during the retrieval phase, all participants solved an unrelated visual tracking task that appeared in either an associated (congruent) or an incongruent spatial location. Half the participants were instructed to look at the tracking task, half to shift their attention covertly (while keeping the eyes fixed). In two experiments, we found that memory retrieval depended on the location to which participants shifted their attention covertly. Thus, covert shifts of attention seem to be sufficient to cause differences in retrieval performance. The results extend the literature on the relationship between visuospatial attention, eye movements, and verbal memory retrieval and provide deep insights into the nature of the looking-at-nothing phenomenon.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.