Eye movements to absent objects during mental imagery and visual memory in immersive virtual reality
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Eye movements to absent objects during mental imagery and visual memory in immersive virtual reality Sandra Chiquet1 · Corinna S. Martarelli2 · Fred W. Mast1 Received: 21 January 2020 / Accepted: 1 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The role of eye movements in mental imagery and visual memory is typically investigated by presenting stimuli or scenes on a two-dimensional (2D) computer screen. When questioned about objects that had previously been presented on-screen, people gaze back to the location of the stimuli, even though those regions are blank during retrieval. It remains unclear whether this behavior is limited to a highly controlled experimental setting using 2D screens or whether it also occurs in a more naturalistic setting. The present study aims to overcome this shortcoming. Three-dimensional (3D) objects were presented along a circular path in an immersive virtual room. During retrieval, participants were given two tasks: to visualize the objects, which they had encoded before, and to evaluate a statement about visual details of the object. We observed longer fixation duration in the area, on which the object was previously displayed, when compared to other possible target locations. However, in 89% of the time, participants fixated none of the predefined areas. On the one hand, this shows that looking at nothing may be overestimated in 2D screen-based paradigm, on the other hand, the looking at nothing effect was still present in the 3D immersive virtual reality setting, and thus it extends external validity of previous findings. Eye movements during retrieval reinstate spatial information of previously inspected stimuli. Keywords Virtual reality · Mental imagery · Visual memory · Eye movements · Eye tracking
1 Introduction During retrieval people fixate on empty locations that have been associated with task-relevant stimuli during encoding (Altmann 2004; Bone et al. 2019; Brandt and Stark 1997; Johansson et al. 2012; Johansson et al. 2006; Kumcu and Thompson 2018; Laeng et al. 2014; Laeng and Teodorescu 2002; Richardson and Spivey 2000; Scholz et al. 2018; Scholz et al. 2016; Spivey and Geng 2001). For instance, Spivey and Geng (2001) found that when participants were questioned about an object, they gazed back to empty
* Sandra Chiquet [email protected] Corinna S. Martarelli [email protected] Fred W. Mast [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Bern, 3012 Bern, Switzerland
Swiss Distance University Institute, 3900 Brig, Switzerland
2
locations on the screen corresponding to those, where visual information was presented during encoding. To date, many studies have replicated such “looking at nothing” on a twodimensional (2D) computer screen (Johansson and Johansson 2014; Martarelli et al. 2017; Martarelli and Mast 2011, 2013). The typical screen-based variant of looking at nothing leads to increased experimental control but is not necessarily a suitable model for mental imagery and visual memory processes in rea
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