Moving fast and seeing slow? The visual consequences of vigorous movement

Rolfs, Martin; Ohl, Sven

doi:10.1017/s0140525x2100025x

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…While peak velocity constitutes an important parameter for characterizing an action, it remains to be explored how it relates to memory performance. If vigorous (short-latency and high-speed) movements reflect optimal movement preparation, they may also entail more efficient visual processing of presaccadic information (Rolfs & Ohl, 2021). Accordingly, we predict that saccades with shorter latencies and higher peak velocities are associated with better memory performance than saccades with longer latencies and lower peak velocities.…”

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confidence: 99%

Saccadic selection in visual working memory is robust across the visual field and linked to saccade metrics: Evidence from nine experiments and more than 100,000 trials.

Ohl,

Kroell,

Rolfs

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Visual working memory and actions are closely intertwined. Memory can guide our actions, but actions also impact what we remember. Even during memory maintenance, actions such as saccadic eye movements select content in visual working memory, resulting in better memory at locations that are congruent with the action goal as compared to incongruent locations. Here, we further substantiate the claim that saccadic eye movements are fundamentally linked to visual working memory by analyzing a large data set (.100k trials) of nine experiments (eight of them previously published). Using Bayesian hierarchical models, we demonstrate robust saccadic selection across the full range of probed saccade directions, manifesting as better memory performance at the saccade goal irrespective of its location in the visual field. By inspecting individual differences in saccadic selection, we show that saccadic selection was highly prevalent in the population. Moreover, both saccade metrics and visual working memory performance varied considerably across the visual field. Crucially, however, both idiosyncratic and systematic visual field anisotropies were not correlated between visual working memory and the oculomotor system, suggesting that they resulted from different sources (e.g., rely on separate spatial maps). In stark contrast, trial-by-trial variations in saccade metrics were strongly associated with memory performance: At any given location, shorter saccade latencies and more accurate saccades were associated with better memory performance, undergirding a robust link between action selection and visual memory. Public Significance StatementWhen we try to memorize what we have just seen, the places we look at will determine what we will remember and what we will forget: whatever had been visible at the goal of your eye movement will most likely be stored in memory. Here, we demonstrate that this selection mechanism in visual memory is highly prevalent in healthy human observers and robust across eye movement directions. Moreover, fast and accurate saccades as opposed to slow inaccurate ones are associated with an improved ability to remember a visual stimulus on a single trial, underscoring the immediate and intertwined relationship between actions and visual memory.

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confidence: 99%