Looking Into the Past: Eye Movements Characterize Elements of Autobiographical Recall in Interviews with Holocaust Survivors

TL;DR

This study explores how eye movements relate to autobiographical memory recall in interviews with Holocaust survivors, revealing gaze patterns linked to emotional and temporal aspects of memory.

Contribution

It extends understanding of eye-mind connection to naturalistic, emotional autobiographical recall, using a large corpus of semi-naturalistic interviews.

Findings

Gaze patterns vary significantly across temporal contexts, especially in vertical eye movements.

Eye movements before sentence onset can predict the temporal context of recall.

Results support the role of eye gaze in memory retrieval in emotional, real-world settings.

Abstract

Eye movement and memory retrieval are deeply and bidirectionally intertwined, however existing literature is generally confined to controlled lab settings. We investigate the relationship between eye gaze and memory recall in free-form autobiographical recall, which comprises both autonoetic consciousness -- the ability to mentally place oneself in the past or future -- and various affective states. Using a large video corpus of semi-naturalistic interviews with Holocaust survivors (N = 806), we examine eye movements with respect to episodic, semantic, affective, and temporal dimensions of traumatic and highly emotional autobiographical recall. We observe gaze patterns vary significantly across certain temporal contexts, most prominently in vertical eye movements. We additionally train intra-subject sequence models to predict temporal context of sentences from segments of gaze features, and find that eye movements entirely preceding sentence onset are sufficient for prediction. Our results corroborate prior findings in literature linking eye movements to memory in controlled and semi-structured settings, reinforcing the role of eye gaze in retrieving and constructing memories, especially in highly emotional and remote memory recall.