Less imageable words lead to more looks to blank locations during memory retrieval

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Linguistics

Background:

• Individuals often look towards spatial locations when retrieving visually encoded information, even without a visual stimulus.
• This behavior, termed "looking at nothing," is hypothesized to be influenced by memory load and the robustness of mental representations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if word retrieval difficulty, specifically related to imageability, influences the frequency of "looking at nothing."
• To explore the relationship between semantic properties of words and spatial gaze behavior during memory recall.

Main Methods:

• Participants recalled high-difficulty and low-difficulty nouns presented in a grid format.
• Lexico-semantic variables, including imageability and concreteness, were controlled.
• Eye movements and "looking at nothing" instances were recorded and analyzed using mixed-effects modeling.

Main Results:

• More frequent "looking at nothing" was observed during the retrieval of high-difficulty nouns compared to low-difficulty nouns.
• Imagery-related semantic factors, specifically imageability and concreteness, significantly predicted "looking at nothing."
• This provides direct evidence linking word difficulty and imageability to spatial gaze during recall.

Conclusions:

• "Looking at nothing" is modulated by word difficulty, particularly by imageability.
• The findings support the integrated memory account, suggesting "looking at nothing" is a manifestation of mental imagery in linguistic recall.