Micalee Segers¹ (), McKenzie Sheets¹, Tori Jones¹, Shannon Ross-Sheehy¹; ¹University of Tennessee Knoxville

Change detection tasks are commonly used as a measure of visual working memory (Luck & Vogel, 1997). In these tasks, adults are typically given instructions to encode and remember array items, then report if they detect a change from sample array to test. However, additional work has shown that memories are stronger when the changed item was overtly fixated during the sample array (Eschman & Ross-Sheehy, 2023). This is important, as participants who naturally scan more might be more likely to have fixated the to-be-changed item, resulting in especially strong memory. If overt fixation is advantageous, then we would expect adult viewers to fixate more array items when they are instructed to detect a color change, than when they are passively viewing arrays with no response requirement. To test this, 46 adults were tested in a change detection task (sample=1500ms, retention=500ms, test=3000ms) consisting of a passive block, during which participants were given no instructions, immediately followed by an active block in which participants were instructed to indicate if any of the array items changed color from sample to test. Eye-tracking was used to sample gaze at 500Hz. Preliminary results indicate that explicit instructions did influence array scanning F(1,21981)=34.22, p<.001; participants fixated more array items in the active block (3.37) than the passive block (3.19). Interestingly, this did not influence preference for the changed item, as change preferences did not differ between groups, t(389.95)=−0.33, p=0.742). This suggests that having an explicit task can influence array scanning, but this does not influence relative preference for the changed item. These results demonstrate that passive behaviors like change preference may reveal implicit change detection, and that these automatic processes are less influenced by task goal. Additional analyses will use passive change preference to explore the relationship between scanning strategy and subsequent working memory representations.