Department of Psychology, University of Bern, 3012, Bern, Switzerland.
Faculty of Psychology, UniDistance Suisse, 3900, Brig, Switzerland.
Sci Rep. 2022 Aug 19;12(1):14136. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-18080-4.
During recall of visual information people tend to move their eyes even though there is nothing to see. Previous studies indicated that such eye movements are related to the spatial location of previously seen items on 2D screens, but they also showed that eye movement behavior varies significantly across individuals. The reason for these differences remains unclear. In the present study we used immersive virtual reality to investigate how individual tendencies to process and represent visual information contribute to eye fixation patterns in visual imagery of previously inspected objects in three-dimensional (3D) space. We show that participants also look back to relevant locations when they are free to move in 3D space. Furthermore, we found that looking back to relevant locations depends on individual differences in visual object imagery abilities. We suggest that object visualizers rely less on spatial information because they tend to process and represent the visual information in terms of color and shape rather than in terms of spatial layout. This finding indicates that eye movements during imagery are subject to individual strategies, and the immersive setting in 3D space made individual differences more likely to unfold.
在回忆视觉信息时，人们往往会移动眼睛，即使没有什么可看的。先前的研究表明，这种眼动与在 2D 屏幕上先前看到的项目的空间位置有关，但也表明眼动行为在个体之间差异很大。这些差异的原因尚不清楚。在本研究中，我们使用沉浸式虚拟现实来研究个体处理和表示视觉信息的倾向如何有助于在三维 (3D) 空间中对先前检查过的物体的视觉意象中的注视模式。我们表明，当参与者在 3D 空间中自由移动时，他们也会回头看相关位置。此外，我们发现，回头看相关位置取决于视觉物体意象能力的个体差异。我们认为，物体视觉者不太依赖空间信息，因为他们倾向于根据颜色和形状而不是空间布局来处理和表示视觉信息。这一发现表明，意象中的眼动受到个体策略的影响，而 3D 空间中的沉浸式设置更有可能展现个体差异。
