Mounting evidence linking gaze reinstatement—the recapitulationof encoding-related gaze patterns during retrieval—tobehavioral measures of memory suggests that eye movementsplay an important role in mnemonic processing. Yet, the natureof the gaze scanpath, including its informational content andneural correlates, has remained in question. In this study, weexamined eye movement and neural data from a recognitionmemory task to further elucidate the behavioral and neuralbases of functional gaze reinstatement. Consistent with previouswork, gaze reinstatement during retrieval of freely viewedscene images was greater than chance and predictive of recognitionmemory performance. Gaze reinstatement was also associatedwith viewing of informationally salient image regions atencoding, suggesting that scanpaths may encode and containhigh-level scene content. At the brain level, gaze reinstatementwas predicted by encoding-related activity in the occipital poleand BG, neural regions associated with visual processing andoculomotor control. Finally, cross-voxel brain pattern similarityanalysis revealed overlapping subsequent memory and subsequentgaze reinstatement modulation effects in the parahippocampalplace area and hippocampus, in addition to the occipitalpole and BG. Together, these findings suggest that encodingrelatedactivity in brain regions associated with scene processing,oculomotor control, and memory supports the formation,and subsequent recapitulation, of functional scanpaths. Morebroadly, these findings lend support to Scanpath Theory’s assertionthat eye movements both encode, and are themselves embeddedin, mnemonic representations.
展开▼
