Revealing memory mechanisms in active vision through EEG-eye movement coregistration

Contemporary experimental psychology is shifting away from constrained laboratory settings to tasks that more closely resemble real-world behavior. Traditional experiments often present stimuli at fixed screen locations, which restricts the use of active vision involving eye movements integral to the neural processes underlying perception, attention, and memory. Recent research has highlighted the tight connection between gaze behavior and memory: eye movements not only gather visual information but also organize interrelated features across space and time. To understand these processes, memory-related brain activity have to be studied in relation to ongoing, unrestricted eye movements. EEG-eye movement coregistration during free viewing provides a powerful method for this purpose. Despite challenges posed by overlapping EEG responses to sequential saccades, this approach enables investigation of how attention and memory interact across eye movements. We have demonstrated this in studies on memory failures during encoding that lead to change blindness, on refixations (gaze return to previously viewed locations) that reflect memory dynamics across eye movements, and on the gaze-dependent formation of episodic memories. Thus, this technique offers a promising way to investigate perceptual and cognitive processes under ecologically valid experimental conditions.