A fresh pair of eyes on prospective memory monitoring

Abstract

Remembering to complete one's future intentions is termed prospective memory. We employed a new eyetracking paradigm to concretely observe the impact of environmental cues on strategic monitoring within a visual prospective memory task. Participants worked on a continuous living-count task comprising images, while simultaneously being asked to respond to a prospective memory target when it appeared. Importantly, the prospective memory target appeared in a different area of the participant's visual field than did the continuous task, which is consistent with prospective memory in many real-world situations, and further allows for a clear index of strategic monitoring processes. Subtle cues in the form of semantically related images were embedded in the continuous task to prompt monitoring for the prospective memory target. Overt strategic monitoring was operationalized as the number of times participants fixated on the designated target area, and cue-driven monitoring was defined by the number of fixations on the prospective memory target region directly after fixating on a related cue. Overt strategic monitoring for the prospective memory target was directly observed for participants in the prospective memory condition, and cue-driven monitoring was also observed in these participants, since they were more likely to initiate monitoring immediately after fixating on a semantically related cue, relative to an unrelated cue. This psychophysiological approach afforded precise measurement of the strategic monitoring process and revealed how contextual cues in the environment interact with the cognitive mechanisms supporting prospective memory.

Investigating prospective memory via eye tracking: No evidence for a monitoring deficit in older adults

“…Apart from the classical measures of monitoring via ongoing task measures, we additionally measured monitoring by the proportion of eye movements to the respective target region (see also Shelton and Christopher, 2016). As only a handful of studies investigated PM target monitoring using eye tracking, some scepsis remains whether eye movements can be considered a valid indicator of strategic monitoring and are not simply driven by involuntary reflexes to e.g., salient stimuli.…”

“…However, large ongoing task measures do not necessarily relate to high monitoring, as intention maintenance (Ballhausen et al, 2017), general slowing in older adults (Henry et al, 2015), or target location could contribute to higher ongoing task response times. Thus, eye tracking seems to have advantages over traditional ongoing task measures and can be a good way of better understanding monitoring behavior (see also Bowden et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2013;Shelton and Christopher, 2016). Yet, due to age-related changes in the anatomy of the eye (e.g., Salvi et al, 2006) as well as the greater need for glasses in the older sample, data quality was worse in the older adults compared to the younger ones.…”

“…Only very few studies have so far used eye tracking methods to capture PM monitoring behavior and no study so far used eye tracking to investigate monitoring processes in older adults. As opposed to indirect measures of monitoring, in eye tracking paradigms we can study a behavior that occurs when monitoring takes place (i.e., a specific eye movement), which allows to quantify monitoring behavior (see e.g., Shelton and Christopher, 2016) and to identify on a trial-level whether monitoring took place (see e.g., West et al, 2007). In the following, all available studies of PM and eye tracking are presented, thereby highlighting their contribution to study monitoring processes.…”

“…Equally, West et al (2007) demonstrated that correctly reported PM targets were fixated more often and also longer than those that were missed. Furthermore, using a more classical PM paradigm, Shelton and Christopher (2016) presented pictures in the ongoing task that were either semantically related to the PM target picture or not. The PM target area was outside the observer's field of view.…”

Gaze Fixation Patterns Correlate with Visual Attention and Memory: the Results of a Pilot Study in Healthy Subjects

“…It has been shown that the content of visual stimuli, the distribution of visual attention, the testing conditions and the memory indicators are closely related. For instance, the distribution of visual fixations may be affected by the parallel implementation of two types of activity [9]. Emotionally significant stimuli attract longer visual fixations than neutral ones [10].…”