A Gaze into the Mind’s Eye: Gaze as an Indicator of Cortical Reinstatement during Mental Imagery

When a previously encountered image is visualized, the spatiotemporal pattern of fixations observed during encoding is often recapitulated. Modern theories posit that fixation recapitulation facilitates, and is facilitated by, the retrieval of detailed internal memory representations. However, there currently exists no direct neuroscientific evidence of this claim. Using an fMRI-based measure of neural reinstatement as a proxy for internal memory representations, we found significant correlations between fixation recapitulation and neural reinstatement during visualization. Additionally, we found a strong correlation between memory performance and neural reinstatement, which mediated a non-significant correlation between memory performance and fixation recapitulation. A secondary goal of the discussed research was the development of a fixation similarity measure optimized for visualization tasks. We found that a measure based solely on fixation angle outperformed a traditional location measure, supporting a chunk-based theory of fixation recapitulation. In total, our results support and extend current theories of fixation recapitulation.M.A