ArticlePsychological research2020
Less imageable words lead to more looks to blank locations during memory retrieval.
Article in Psychological research, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- The role of eye movements and covert shifts of attention in working and long-term memory retrieval.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Tracking Reactivation of Location Information during Memory Strategies: Insights from Eye Movements.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- Content categorization for memory retrieval: A method for evaluating design performance.PloS one · 2023Article
- Information stored in memory affects abductive reasoning.Psychological research · 2021Article
- The prioritization of visuo-spatial associations during mental imagery.Cognitive processing · 2021Article
- Audiovisual Learning in Dyslexic and Typical Adults: Modulating Influences of Location and Context Consistency.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Eye movements support behavioral pattern completion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Eye Movements Actively Reinstate Spatiotemporal Mnemonic Content.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
People revisit spatial locations of visually encoded information when they are asked to retrieve that information, even when the visual image is no longer present. Such "looking at nothing" during retrieval is likely modulated by memory load (i.e., mental effort to maintain and reconstruct information) and the strength of mental representations. We investigated whether words that are more difficult to remember also lead to more looks to relevant, blank locations. Participants were presented four nouns on a two by two grid. A number of lexico-semantic variables were controlled to form high-difficulty and low-difficulty noun sets. Results reveal more frequent looks to blank locations during retrieval of high-difficulty nouns compared to low-difficulty ones. Mixed-effects modelling demonstrates that imagery-related semantic factors (imageability and concreteness) predict looking at nothing during retrieval. Results provide the first direct evidence that looking at nothing is modulated by word difficulty and in particular, word imageability. Overall, the research provides substantial support to the integrated memory account for linguistic stimuli and looking at nothing as a form of mental imagery.
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