Gaze patterns reveal how situation models and text representations contribute to episodic text memory

When recalling something you have previously read, to what degree will such episodic remembering activate a situation model of described events versus a memory representation of the text itself? The present study was designed to address this question by recording eye movements of participants who recalled previously read texts while looking at a blank screen. An accumulating body of research has demonstrated that spontaneous eye movements occur during episodic memory retrieval and that fixation locations from such gaze patterns to a large degree overlap with the visuospatial layout of the recalled information. Here we used this phenomenon to investigate to what degree participants' gaze patterns corresponded with the visuospatial configuration of the text itself versus a visuospatial configuration described in it. The texts to be recalled were scene descriptions, where the spatial configuration of the scene content was manipulated to be either congruent or incongruent with the spatial configuration of the text itself. Results show that participants' gaze patterns were more likely to correspond with a visuospatial representation of the described scene than with a visuospatial representation of the text itself, but also that the contribution of those representations of space is sensitive to the text content. This is the first demonstration that eye movements can be used to discriminate on which representational level texts are remembered and the findings provide novel insight into the underlying dynamics in play.