Autobiographical memory retrieval is initiated by an attentional switch from the outside world to a temporary internal mental space. Gaze aversion is assumed to play a role during this phase, but has received very limited attention thus far. We designed a protocol where 33 participants answered 48 autobiographical questions while their eye movements were recorded with an eye-tracker and camcorder. Results indicated that gaze aversion prevailed over other eye behaviors such as changes of vergence. It occurred early, predominantly during the access phase of memory retrieval. Gaze aversion was observed in different directions depending on the subjects and was related to cognitive effort. It was decoupled from head movement. These results support the hypothesis that gaze aversion is related to the attentional switch from the outside world to memory.

Gaze direction is a powerful social cue that indicates the direction of attention and can be used to decode others’ mental states. When an individual looks at an external object, inferring where their attention is focused from their gaze direction is easy. But when people are immersed in memories, their attention is oriented towards their inner world. Is there any specific gaze direction in this situation, and if so, which one? While trying to remember, a common behavior is gaze aversion, which has mostly been reported as an upward-directed gaze. Our primary aim was to evaluate whether gaze direction plays a role in the inference of the orientation of attention—i.e., external vs. internal—in particular, whether an upward direction is considered as an indicator of attention towards the internal world. Our secondary objective was to explore whether different gaze directions are consistently attributed to different types of internal mental states and, more specifically, memory states (autobiographical or semantic memory retrieval, or working memory). Gaze aversion is assumed to play a role in perceptual decoupling, which is supposed to support internal attention. We therefore also tested whether internal attention was associated with high gaze eccentricity because the mismatch between head and eye direction alters visual acuity. We conducted two large-sample (160–163 participants) online experiments. Participants were asked to choose which mental state—among different internal and external attentional states—they would attribute to faces with gazes oriented in different directions. Participants significantly associated internal attention with an upward-averted gaze across experiments, while external attention was mostly associated with a gaze remaining on the horizontal axis. This shows that gaze direction is robustly used by observers to infer others’ mental states. Unexpectedly, internal attentional states were not more associated with gaze eccentricity at high (30°) than low (10°) eccentricity and we found that autobiographical memory retrieval, but not the other memory states, was highly associated with 10° downward gaze. This reveals the possible existence of different types of gaze aversion for different types of memories and opens new perspectives.

Remembering and mentally reliving yesterday's lunch is a typical example of episodic autobiographical memory retrieval. In the present review, we reappraised the complex cascade of cognitive processes involved in memory retrieval, by highlighting one particular phase that has received little interest so far: attentional switch to memory (ASM). As attention cannot be simultaneously directed toward external stimuli and internal memories, there has to be an attentional switch from the external to the internal world in order to initiate memory retrieval. We formulated hypotheses and developed hypothetical models of both the cognitive and brain processes that accompany ASM. We suggest that gaze aversion could serve as an objective temporal marker of the point at which people switch their attention to memory, and highlight several fields (neuropsychology, neuroscience, social cognition, comparative psychology) in which ASM markers could be essential.Our review thus provides a new framework for understanding the early stages of autobiographical memory retrieval.