Speaker
Description
Forgetting is a fundamental aspect of memory, yet the cognitive mechanisms underlying the degradation of complex episodic representations remain a matter of debate. While traditional models characterize forgetting as a linear decline in recall over time, emerging evidence suggests a more nuanced process influenced by attentional dynamics. This study examined how attention during encoding and retrieval shapes memory accuracy and forgetting rates for naturalistic scenes—rich, contextually meaningful stimuli that offer greater ecological validity than isolated objects or letters.
Twenty-five participants studied 132 indoor and outdoor scenes while their eye movements were recorded during encoding and across three recognition sessions (30 minutes, 4 hours, and 8 hours later). Attentional spread during encoding was quantified using the Root Mean Square Distance (RMSD) of fixations, while gaze reinstatement during recognition was assessed via the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) of scan paths.
Results revealed that greater attentional spread during encoding consistently predicted higher memory accuracy, independent of the retention interval. Gaze reinstatement—the similarity of scan paths between encoding and recognition—also positively correlated with recognition accuracy, though its effect diminished over time.
These findings highlight the contributions of both attentional allocation and retrieval processes to memory preservation. They underscore attention’s critical role not only in memory formation but also in mitigating forgetting, offering new insights into the dynamic interplay between attention and long-term memory for complex visual scenes.
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