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PSYCHOLOGY

A gaze bias in the mind’s eye

Nature Human Behaviour volume 3, pages 424–425 (2019)Cite this article

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Can the eye movements we make when there is nothing to look at shed light on our cognitive processes? A new study shows that tiny gaze shifts reveal people’s attended locations in memorized—rather than visual—space. The discovery indicates that the oculomotor system is engaged in the focusing of attention within the internal space of memory.

Microsaccades—the small, jerk-like eye movements we involuntarily produce during gaze-fixation attempts—have been linked to covert attention, i.e., attention that is localized away from the centre of gaze5. Specifically, a growing body of evidence indicates that microsaccade directions tend to be biased towards covertly attended locations, presumably due to the extensive overlap between the saccadic and attentional control neural systems6. A central innovation introduced by van Ede and colleagues is that they probed the oculomotor system’s contribution to the focusing of attention, not in the spatial layout of an actual scene, but within the observers’ memorized space.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ophthalmology, State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York, USA

    Susana Martinez-Conde & Robert G. Alexander

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  1. Susana Martinez-Conde
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  2. Robert G. Alexander
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Correspondence to Susana Martinez-Conde.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Martinez-Conde, S., Alexander, R.G. A gaze bias in the mind’s eye. Nat Hum Behav 3, 424–425 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0546-1

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