How the brain constructs the present and reconstructs the past via sequences of eye movements

Episodic memory refers to our ability to mentally travel back in time to relive past experiences in vivid detail. A critical aspect when forming coherent episodic memories is that our perception has limited "bandwith", as we can only apprehend visual information in full acuity from a small part of our visual field at a time. To overcome this limitation, we constantly shift our visual focus of attention through a sequence of eye movements. How we construct the present is thus critically determined by how we visually "sample" the world over time when we act upon it via sequences of eye movements. Current research further highlights that such visual sampling behavior is critical also when we engage in episodic remembering and reconstruct events from our past (in the absence of supporting visual input).

The goal of the proposed project is to investigate how the brain, based on our visual sampling behavior, builds up coherent event representations when we construct and reconstruct memories over time. We will capitalize on recent advances in co-registration of eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) together with state-of-the-art machine learning methods of multivariate patterns analysis (MVPA) to measure how content specific neural representations build up across sequences of eye movements. Our innovative approach will allow us to address questions at the forefront of current memory research, revealing the dynamics in how we construct the present and reconstruct the past.