Chloe Kindell¹ (), Heather Lucas¹; ¹Louisiana State University

Humans use eye movements to encode information into memory, and memory difficulties are often linked to altered viewing behaviors. For instance, hippocampal amnesia has been associated with reduced or less effective viewing patterns during memory tasks, indicative of altered communication between memory and vision. This study examined whether taxing attentional resources would produce similar effects in healthy young adults. Eye movements were recorded while participants (n=44) viewed eighty displays of six abstract line drawings, each followed by a spatial reconstruction test. Attentional resources during the study phases were manipulated within-subjects by varying the difficulty of a concurrent auditory task in a block design. Block order was counterbalanced across participants, with half completing the “easy” blocks first and half starting with the “hard” blocks. Overall, greater secondary task difficulty was associated with: 1) worse memory performance, and 2) constrained visual exploration, as evidenced by fewer and longer fixations during study. Unexpectedly, these effects interacted with the order in which participants were exposed to the two levels of secondary task difficulty. Participants who received the hard blocks first showed improved memory performance when tasks became easier, despite no changes in viewing behavior. Conversely, participants who received the easy blocks first exhibited stable memory performance across task difficulties but made fewer and longer fixations when the task became harder. These findings suggest that the relationship between attentional resource availability and memory-related viewing behaviors can be influenced by task experience. Strategically constraining one’s viewing may help to preserve memory performance when attention is suddenly taxed mid-task, while a mid-task increase in attentional resources may enhance encoding effectiveness without altering viewing patterns. Follow-up studies are in progress to clarify the mechanisms driving these patterns.

Acknowledgements: Louisiana Board of Regents